A remote area in Nevada’s Great Basin is set to host the world’s most sensitive radio telescope array. The California Institute of Technology, which is leading the project, announced last week that it has secured enough funding to start construction.
Known as the Deep Synoptic Array (DSA), the project will feature 1,650 individual radio dishes. These will study phenomena such as supermassive black holes, pulsars (spinning dead stars), and fast radio bursts, which are brief, intense explosions of radio waves from space. Gregg Hallinan, a professor of astronomy at Caltech, highlighted the project’s uniqueness due to the sheer number of antennas involved.
Radio telescopes collect naturally occurring radio waves emitted by celestial objects like stars and galaxies. Unlike optical telescopes, which capture images directly, radio telescopes convert the signals they receive into data or images. Hallinan believes the DSA will be able to survey the sky 100 times faster than existing telescopes.
Each dish will be about 20 feet wide, creating one of the largest radio telescope arrays ever built, covering more than 123 square miles in White Pine County, managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The project is currently going through the permitting process, and construction could begin next year, with completion expected by 2029.
Funding for the DSA comes from Schmidt Sciences, founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. As an initial test, two prototype dishes were recently built in California. The selected location in the Great Basin is ideal due to its low population and minimal radio interference.
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