Future Plans


We are cooperating with astronomers at Princeton University in duplicating our electronic and optical hardware on their 36" optical telescope. When this telescope is coordinated with the Oak Ridge 61" telescope, we can be sure that short pulses of light seen simultaneously by both systems are truly from astronomically distant sources, and are not due to local noise or electrical transients, or local events (such as atmospheric Cerenkov flashes, cosmic ray muons or electron showers).

Because it is narrowly targeted, our experiment is sensitive to a tiny fraction of the sky (approximately one millionth of it). We are designing and beginning construction of a multipixel version of our present system that can scan most of the sky in about a year. See All-sky Survey for ongoing progress!

We also have an interest in extending this search (and/or future searches) for light pulses from optical to infrared wavelengths, where the galaxy is far more transparent, and as a bonus, where more photons are received for the same pulse energy.