Research & telescopes
Where we build and observe
Our instruments live where the sky is quiet. Some we build and run; others we contribute to as part of larger collaborations.
Observatory sites
United States
West Virginia
- GBO CHIME/FRB outrigger station at Green Bank Observatory, West Virginia
- TONE Outrigger pathfinder array at Green Bank
- GBT and other Green Bank telescopes With the WVU Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology
Canada
British Columbia
South Africa
The Karoo
- HIRAX 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 sees a large part of the northern sky at once, which is what makes it such a prolific detector of fast radio bursts. What a single site cannot do is say precisely where on the sky a burst originated.
The outrigger stations solve that. By recording the same burst from Green Bank, Hat Creek, and KKO at the same time, and correlating those signals using very long baseline interferometry, a burst can be localized precisely enough to identify its host galaxy — and in the best cases, a specific region within it.
Building those stations is much of what this lab does: the analog front ends, the timing and clock distribution that keeps widely separated sites coherent, and the software that turns the recorded voltages into a position on the sky.