Ambitious Radio Telescope Array to Transform Astronomy in Nevada

A new radio telescope array, called the Deep Synoptic Array, will soon rise in the Nevada desert within the Great Basin. The California Institute of Technology leads this initiative. They recently announced that they have secured enough funding to move forward with construction.

This ambitious project includes 1,650 radio dishes. Together, they will focus on studying supermassive black holes, pulsars, and fast radio bursts—brief, intense radio wave explosions from deep space. Gregg Hallinan, a professor of astronomy at Caltech and principal investigator for the project, emphasized its uniqueness due to the sheer number of antennas involved.

Radio telescopes detect naturally occurring radio emissions from celestial bodies such as stars, planets, and galaxies. Analyzing these emissions helps astronomers understand the structure, composition, and characteristics, like temperature, of these objects. Although radio telescopes don’t capture images like optical ones, they can process radio signals into data, which are then transformed into images.

The Deep Synoptic Array promises unrivaled performance among ground-based radio telescopes. It will survey the sky 100 times faster and provide the highest-quality radio images produced to date. “Every telescope built so far has identified about 20 million radio sources,” Hallinan stated. “This telescope will double that number within the first 24 hours.”

Each dish will measure about 20 feet across, and collectively, they will form one of the largest radio telescope arrays ever, spanning over 123 square miles in White Pine County, Nevada, on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

The project is currently in the permitting phase, with construction potentially starting next year and completion aimed for 2029.

Traditionally, ground-based radio telescopes fall into two categories. One is massive single-dish telescopes, like West Virginia’s 328-foot-wide Green Bank Telescope. The other consists of smaller dishes forming large arrays, such as New Mexico’s Very Large Array with 27 dishes arranged in a Y-shape. Single dishes tend to detect faint radio waves from the cosmos more sensitively, whereas arrays of smaller dishes yield sharper images. Hallinan explained that the Deep Synoptic Array will excel in both areas.

According to project co-principal investigator Vikram Ravi, the array will scan millions of stars, galaxies, and other sources of radio light. It will conduct at least five sky surveys, identifying radio emissions for other observatories to explore.Radio astronomy is about to go from sketch to photograph, Ravi commented, emphasizing the Deep Synoptic Array’s broad reach and frequency.

Project funding came from Schmidt Sciences, founded in 2024 by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy. Schmidt, now CEO of Relativity Space, recently secured a significant NASA contract for a Mars mission in 2028.

Ahead of full-scale construction, prototype dishes were built near Bishop, California, as technology demonstrations. The site for the Deep Synoptic Array was carefully chosen to minimize radio frequency interference, like signals from cellphones or Wi-Fi. During site selection, Hallinan and his team surveyed the western United States. Nevada’s Great Basin provided an ideal setting due to its low population and natural shielding from interference.

“This telescope is sensitive enough to detect a cellphone as far away as the sun,” Hallinan noted. “The quiet valleys in White Pine County were the quietest we found, making them perfect for radio astronomy.”