November 7, 2025 8-10 PM

Event Type: Lecture and Stargazing
Title: Building the World’s Most Powerful Radio Telescope
Lecturer: Gregg Hallinan
Position: Faculty
Institution: Caltech
Abstract:
Caltech is developing the world's most powerful radio telescope, the Deep Synoptic Array (DSA). Construction will begin in 2026 in a remote radio-quiet valley in Nevada. 1,650 dishes, each 20-ft (6.15m) in diameter will be deployed across a 12.5 x 10 mile area. Signals will be transmitted via underground fiber-optic cables and combined in a central supercomputer, or “radio camera,” that will process data at a rate of 200 Tb/s, comparable to the total internet traffic in the United States. This unprecedented capability will produce a movie of the changing sky as seen through radio waves. It will enable the detection of one billion new radio sources, a hundred times more than all previous radio telescopes combined. The DSA-2000 is expected to drive discoveries across radio astronomy, including identifying exotic neutron stars, mapping the cosmic web, tracking the formation and evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes over cosmic time, and detecting the stretching and squeezing of the very fabric of the Universe.