EE Devices Seminar- Sander Weinreb

New Era: In the past the objects observed in radio astronomy were the 21cm hydrogen line, thermal emission from planets in our solar system, and from unusual stars and galaxies which typically do not change in a human lifetime. Whereas, in the new era many objects of interest vary on a millisecond of time scale. The current research topics are pulses from neutron stars, study of planets around other stars including search for emissions from primordial life, study of radio emissions from the perimeter of black holes, and study of the origins of pf Fast Radio Bursts (FRB's) which strike the earth from random directions at detectable levels at a rate of over 500 per day.

New Technology: Rather than just detecting weak signals from a small area of sky with a large single-dish telescope, the new objects are best studied by forming radio images of large areas of the sky. This is best performed by large arrays of small telescopes utilizing the correlation of signals from each pair of telescope. For this purpose Caltech is constructing a 1650x6.2m Radio Camera array located in a 20km diameter region in Nevada and operating in the frequency range of 700 to 200 MHz.