Abstract

Invited Talk - Splinter FutureRadio

Monday, 09 September 2024, 17:15   (S26)

The DSA-2000 Radio Camera - a new window to the radio universe

Fabian Walter, Gregg Hallinan
MPIA Heidelberg, Caltech

The DSA-2000 will be a world-leading radio survey telescope and multi-messenger discovery engine. The array will consist of 2000 × 5m dishes instantaneously covering the 0.7 - 2 GHz frequency range, spanning an area of 19 km × 15 km in Nevada. In an initial five-year survey, the DSA-2000 will image ~30,000 deg2 repeatedly over sixteen epochs, producing a combined full-Stokes sky map with 500 nJy/beam rms noise and 3.3 arcsecond spatial resolution. Fundamental questions surrounding the baryon cycle in galaxies, the formation of stars over cosmic time, and the influence of active SMBHs on galaxies, will be addressed by detecting over a billion star-forming galaxies and active SMBHs, and by observing the neutral-hydrogen kinematics and contents of several million galaxies. The array will revolutionize the field of radio transients, detecting >10,000 FRBs and >1 million slow transients, with sub-arcsecond localization for host galaxy identification. The DSA-2000 will be a leading instrument for the discovery and characterization of the electromagnetic counterparts to neutron-star mergers found by ground-based GW detectors. Simultaneously, the multi-year timing of radio pulses from 200 pulsars array by the NANOGrav collaboration will enable the first detections of nanoHertz GWs from individual binary supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galaxy mergers. The DSA-2000 is enabled by two breakthrough technologies, i) a low-cost antenna with an ambient temperature receiver and ii) a new generation of digital back-end known as a radio camera, that outputs image data in real time.