World’s most powerful and sensitive Radio Telescope

 Scientists readies to build world’s most sensitive and powerful Radio Telescope in Nevada         

Caltech researchers are preparing to build a radio telescope which will be the most sensitive ever constructed and survey the sky 100 times faster than any other radio telescope worldwide. Deep Synoptic Array will feature 1,650 dishes in Nevada, survey sky 100 times faster than existing telescopes. Schmidt Sciences has greenlit construction of the Deep Synoptic Array after the project completed its final design review. The milestone paves the way for construction to begin on the telescope, which is planned for a remote valley in Nevada. The array will consist of 1,650 radio dishes, each slightly more than 6 meters in diameter. The team plans to build the telescope by 2029, with science operations commencing soon after. This could become the most sensitive and fastest radio telescope array ever built. The ambitions are staggeringly vast. Once completed, the Deep Synoptic Array (DSA) will feature a whopping 1,650 radio dishes, each measuring just shy of 20 feet across, spanning an area of 12 by 10 miles in a remote Nevada desert valley. To put those numbers into perspective, New Mexico’s Very Large Array, one of the largest radio telescopes, is made up of just 27 radio dishes.

Arrays made up of large numbers of dishes have a key advantage: they can dramatically improve the spatial resolution of deep space observations by effectively acting as one enormous instrument. However, one drawback is that they are far less sensitive to light than one giant dish, making them only suitable for luminous astronomical objects, like pulsars, the highly magnetized remains of dead stars, and fast radio bursts, brief flashes of powerful radio waves. To reduce the chance of radio frequency interference, unwanted external electromagnetic signals or “noise” that have plagued astronomers for decades, the team chose an extremely remote part of the Nevada desert, not far from Great Basin National Park. “The DSA will survey the entire visible sky several times in its first five years at unprecedented speeds,” said Gregg Hallinan, principal investigator of DSA, professor of astronomy at Caltech, and director of Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory. “While all other radio telescopes combined have so far found about 20 million radio sources, the DSA will match that in the first day of operations. By the end of its initial survey, it will have discovered about 1 billion new radio sources.”

The telescope will discover radio emission from millions of stars, galaxies and other cosmic objects. It will address the mysteries of black holes, pulsars and fast radio bursts. It will also probe the physics of dark matter and gravity, and it will measure the structure and expansion of the universe. “Radio astronomy is about to go from sketch to photograph,” said Vikram Ravi, the co-principal investigator of the DSA and a professor of astronomy at Caltech. “The DSA is looking at a far larger volume of the universe far more often than any other telescope.” Scientists behind the DSA promise that the new array will improve on the sensitivity of existing radio telescope arrays while dramatically speeding up the process of scanning wide swathes of the night sky. Researchers are hoping to use the array to study mysterious and little-understood phenomena like fast radio bursts, as well as much broader concepts, like how dark energy influences the expansion of the universe. The speed of the DSA also offers a key advantage: it will give astronomers access to data in near-real-time, allowing them to start processing it almost immediately. Best of all, the public will have unfettered access from the get go.

“We want the whole world to also have access to the data just as quickly as we do,” DSA lead project manager Katie Jameson explained. “The DSA functions like a photo lab that is developing these radio images in real time for all to use.” The DSA will be capable of making images in real time. The numerous radio dishes will feed into a supercomputer which creates images instantly. The images will be immediately accessible to the worldwide astronomical community. “Without the radio camera, we would have to store 100 exabytes of data to complete our survey,” Hallinan said. “This would require 5 million hard drives in a multi-billion-dollar facility the size of multiple football fields. The radio camera solves this problem.” The DSA’s radio camera will convert the raw data to images in real time with the help of an off-site supercomputer built from Graphics Processing Units. The radio camera images will be given freely to the public with no proprietary period.

To keep costs down, Caltech researchers turned to a highly unusual manufacturing partner: cake pan maker Fat Daddio’s. The team contracted the company to produce thousands of baking pans, which turned out to be the perfect shape to help convert electromagnetic waves to electrical signals. “It’s all about metal fabrication, and this is something Fat Daddio’s has a lot of experience in!” DSA lead project engineer Francois Kapp explained. The DSA will have the ability to detect more than 100,000 intensely powerful flashes of radio light from fast radio bursts and to localize them to their home galaxies. The DSA will also reveal more than 20,000 new pulsars. “The science that can be done is endless,” Hallinan said. “There will be enough discoveries to occupy every radio astronomer on the planet.” The DSA is led by Caltech and funded by Schmidt Sciences. It is part of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System. Two pathfinder projects which led to the DSA, the DSA-110 and the OVRO Long Wavelength Array, were funded by the National Science Foundation.