Research and telescopes
Build instruments. Explore the universe.
Our work connects electronics, computing, and astronomy. Explore the research questions and the instruments we contribute to.
Meet our collaborators Browse publicationsResearch you can contribute to
Locate fast radio bursts
Which galaxies produce these brief radio flashes? CHIME and its outriggers combine measurements from widely separated telescopes.
RAIL contributes analog front ends, timing systems, and software that turn recorded signals into sky positions.
Map neutral hydrogen
Hydrogen traces the universe's large-scale structure. Instruments such as CHIME and HIRAX measure its faint radio emission.
Our instrumentation work connects sensitive receivers with digital signal processing.
Improve telescope measurements
Calibration and interference control help distinguish astronomical signals from instrument effects and unwanted radio emission.
Projects combine electronics, testing, and data analysis.
Interested in hardware, software, or analysis? Tell us about your interests and experience.
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Places we work
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Instruments and facilities
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Countries
Where we work
From Green Bank to the Karoo
Each site below lists the instruments the lab runs or contributes to there. Named instruments link out to the project or the paper describing them.
United States
West Virginia
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CHIME/FRB outrigger station at Green Bank Observatory, West Virginia
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Outrigger pathfinder array at Green Bank
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GBT and other Green Bank telescopes
With the WVU Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology
South Africa
The Karoo
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Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment — 1024 dishes, in development
Why outriggers
A fast radio burst lasts a millisecond. Pinning down which galaxy it came from takes telescopes thousands of kilometers apart.
CHIME surveys much of the northern sky at once. This broad coverage enables frequent fast radio burst detections. What a single site cannot do is say precisely where on the sky a burst originated.
The outrigger stations solve that. Green Bank, Hat Creek, and KKO record the same burst simultaneously. Very long baseline interferometry correlates those signals to locate the burst and identify its host galaxy. The best measurements identify a specific region within that galaxy.
Our lab builds these stations' analog front ends, timing systems, and clock distribution. These components keep widely separated sites coherent. Our software converts recorded voltages into a sky position.
Work on these instruments
Students in the lab build hardware that ends up at these sites. Write to us about undergraduate and graduate research.