Data-driven, digital, and dynamic radio astronomy - Jason Hessels (McGill University, UvA & ASTRON)

Data-driven, digital, and dynamic radio astronomy – Jason Hessels

Jason Hessels (McGill University, University of Amsterdam & ASTRON)

Naturally occurring radio waves provide a view of the Universe that is unlike what we can learn with optical light. For example, while optical light reveals the hot Universe of glowing stars, radio waves show us high-energy particles accelerated by strong magnetic fields and black holes. Radio telescopes produce some of the largest data rates in all of science, and a new generation of instruments is leveraging advances in digital technology --- including high-speed networks, GPUs, solid-state drives, and AI --- to do much more with the cosmic radio waves that are constantly washing over the Earth's surface. We are expanding radio telescopes to become wide-field cameras that can take snapshots of the sky thousands of times per second. To answer open question in astrophysics, we need to distill petabytes of data and make real-time decisions about what data to keep. In this talk, I'll introduce radio astronomy, some of the big scientific questions we aim to answer, and some of the big telescopes we're developing to do that.