Nestled in the Great Basin, a remote stretch of the Nevada desert is set to become home to the world’s most sensitive radio telescope array.Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.The California Institute of Technology, which is leading the project, announced last week that it is moving ahead with the telescope’s construction after securing enough funding.Known as the Deep Synoptic Array, the project calls for 1,650 individual radio dishes that together will study supermassive black holes, spinning dead stars known as pulsars and fast radio bursts, which are brief, intense explosions of radio waves that often originate from deep space.“It’s the sheer number of antennas that makes this completely unique and unlike other existing telescopes,” said Gregg Hallinan, a professor of astronomy at Caltech and a principal investigator for the Deep Synoptic Array.Radio telescopes detect naturally occurring radio waves emitted by stars, planets, galaxies and other celestial objects.
Astronomers can analyze the unique patterns of radio emissions from these sources to understand their structure, composition and other characteristics such as temperature.Radio telescopes don’t snap photos in the same way as optical observatories, but the trove of resulting radio signals can be converted into data and turned into images.Hallinan said that once built, the Deep Synoptic Array will outperform all other ground-based radio telescopes that came before it, surveying the sky 100 times faster and producing the highest-quality radio images to date.“Every telescope that has been built in history — and that’s going back a century — combined has found about 20 million radio sources,” he said, referring to objects in space that emit radio waves.“That’s how many radio sources we know of in the universe.
This telescope will double that in the first 24 hours.”Each dish in the project is designed to measure r...