ALBUQUERQUE – Astronomers are using an array of giant dish antennas in the New Mexico desert for a yearslong project aimed at producing the sharpest radio view ever made of a wide swath of the sky as they search for new cosmic discoveries.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory announced the project this week, saying the Very Large Array on the San Augustin Plains west of Socorro will make three scans of the sky visible from its latitude. That means about 80 percent of the sky will be scanned.
The director of the observatory, Tony Beasley, says the results will be a valuable tool for a range of fields in astrophysics.
The survey is expected to turn up supernovae, gamma ray bursts and other things that are typically obstructed from visible-light telescopes.
