Seminar IT : Tuesday 20th March 2012

Antiteatro do Instituto de Telecomunicações, U. Aveiro
17h00 - Tuesday, 20th March 2011

A Joint GRAV IT/DFUA seminar
 
"Risk in radio astronomy; SKA, BINGO and ARCADE".

Abstract: SKA is a great project but it will be very expensive and we will have to wait a long time for it to come to fruition. In the meantime, small, inexpensive, yet exciting projects should be done lest the subject goes stale while we wait. I will talk about two possible such projects close to my heart. BINGO is a project to characterize baryon acoustic oscillations using redshifted hydrogen. Another (L-BASS) is to study the apparent excess low frequency emission claimed by the ARCADE collaboration by making an absolutely calibrated map of the sky at L-band.

Speaker : Prof. Ian Browne

Bio: Ian Browne is Professor of Radio Astronomy in the School of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Manchester at Jodrell Bank, and a Founder member of the CLASS gravitational lens survey. He participates in the Designing and construction of telescope systems capable of detecting baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the distribution of redshifted  neutral hydrogen emission is my current research priority;  has a strong interest in the physics of active galaxies with particular emphasis on low luminosity radio-loud objects including BL Lacs using the SDSS DR6 imaging region and exploiting data from the Fermi gamma-ray satellite;
 One of his long-term projects is OCRA --the One Centimeter Receiver Array. The scientific goal is to carry out surveys of the sky at a
wavelength seven times shorter than any previously done.  OCRA would consist of an array of about 100 feeds and
receivers and would be installed on the 32m Torun Telescope in Poland. The full OCRA 100-beam array is not yet funded
but a 2-beam prototype has been constructed with funds from the Royal Society and testing on the 32m Telescope started in November 2002 and it is now being used regularly for measuring flux densities. Research into using MMICS for the low noise amplifiers in OCRA is part of the FARADAY RTD project funded by the EU. Construction of an 8-beam 30GHz system is complete and being commissioned.