Fields

Radio Astronomy

Radio astronomy observes the universe at radio wavelengths, revealing phenomena invisible to optical telescopes: rotating neutron stars, the cold hydrogen gas fueling star formation, jets from active galactic nuclei, and enigmatic fast radio bursts crossing the cosmos in milliseconds. The Event Horizon Telescope synthesized a network of radio dishes across Earth into an Earth-sized interferometer, producing the first image of a black hole shadow in 2019. The Square Kilometre Array under construction in South Africa and Australia will be the most sensitive radio telescope ever built, mapping hydrogen emission across cosmic time to trace large-scale structure. Pulsar timing arrays monitoring networks of millisecond pulsars have detected a stochastic gravitational wave background from supermassive black hole binaries.

Details

Avg Funding

$750K

Key Technologies

Square Kilometre ArrayVLBI NetworksFast Radio Burst DetectorsPhased ArraysSoftware-Defined Radio

Subfields

Radio InterferometryPulsar Timing21cm CosmologyRadio TransientsVLBI

Top Institutions

CSIRO AustraliaMax Planck Institute for Radio AstronomyCaltech Owens Valley Radio ObservatoryNRAO National Radio Astronomy ObservatoryASTRON Netherlands