Nevada's empty expanses are about to get very busy listening to the universe. Caltech has approved the final design for the Deep Synoptic Array, a $200 million radio telescope project that will blanket a chunk of desert with 1,650 dishes over roughly 120 square miles—an array designed to scan the sky about 100 times faster than any existing telescope. Backed in part by Schmidt Sciences, the philanthropic effort of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, the project is slated to be finished by 2029 and will be powered by a supercomputer that turns torrents of radio signals into sharp images on the fly, Gizmodo reports. "Radio astronomy is about to go from sketch to photograph," says Vikram Ravi, the project's co-principal investigator.
That speed and scale mean discovery on a different order. "The DSA will survey the entire visible sky several times in its first five years at unprecedented speeds," says co-principal investigator Gregg Hallinan at Caltech. "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," says Hallinan, director of Caltech's Owens Valley Radio Observatory and the project's principal investigator.
Caltech says a vast array of "cosmic characters" emit radio signals, including stars, galaxies, pulsars, and black holes, along mysteries like "fast radio bursts" from very distant sources. In a twist on the usual model, the resulting data will go public in real time, with no embargo period for the project's own scientists. "We want the whole world to also have access to the data just as quickly as we do," says project manager Katie Jameson. "There will be enough discoveries to occupy every radio astronomer on the planet," Hallinan says. "With fully public, science-ready data, some of these discoveries may even be made by a high-school student with a clever idea."
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