The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) announced on June 10 that they’ve received the green light from Schmidt Sciences to proceed with the construction of the Deep Synoptic Array (DSA) which, with its planned 1,650 individual radio dishes will become the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the world, reported its website. The DSA is scheduled to be built and completed by 2029.
Radio waves flood the known Universe, ranging from those expelled by jets of material spewed out by black holes, to pulsars and other astronomical activity. Currently, scientists have the option of using a very large single dish, such as China’s gigantic FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope), or a very large array of individual dishes, such as the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Very Large Array in New Mexico. Each option has its own limitations—while giant single dish telescopes are highly sensitive and excel at detecting faint radio waves from across the cosmos, arrays of many dishes produce much sharper images. (Radio telescopes don’t “take pictures” like those that operate in the visible light range, but the data is converted to images by supercomputers).
“’The DSA will survey the entire visible sky several times in its first five years at unprecedented speeds,’ says Gregg Hallinan, principal investigator of DSA, professor of astronomy at Caltech, and director of Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO). ‘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.’”
In addition to its exceptional sensitivity and survey speed, the DSA will be uniquely capable of producing real time images that are immediately accessible to astronomers worldwide. While most radio telescopes require weeks or even months to process data into images, the DSA’s 1,650 dishes will feed directly into a supercomputer that generates them instantly—effectively creating the world’s first “radio camera.”
