Column: The New Astronomy<\/p>\n
Published 5:10 am Wednesday, July 29, 2026<\/p>\n
When I first joined NRC I was based in Ottawa.<\/p>\n
From there I used to make observations at the Algonquin Radio Observatory, a 46m dish located in the depths of the Algonquin Provincial Park. Getting there involved taking a midnight train from Ottawa station, and being dropped off at around 3am in the depths of the park, at a little station named Lake Traverse. There was a Dispatcher\u2019s Office (closed), a light, and a bench to sit on.<\/p>\n
I sat there, listening to the wind in the trees, and the sound of the rapids on the nearby Petawawa River, until a car from the observatory came to pick me up. The line and the station are long gone.<\/p>\n
Not that long ago, making observations would involve travelling to an observatory, often in remote, exotic places. For your allocated period of observing time, the facility would be yours, either working alone, or with the assistance of a telescope operator. You might have brought some hardware with you for installation on the telescope for use during your observations, or maybe you just required some adjustments of the instrumentation already there. At the end of your observations, you would take the results of your work back to your home institution and start the analysis. When instruments could only be used for one or two projects at a time, this was normal.<\/p>\n
Now things have changed. Instruments such as CHIME (the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment), an instrument that has been operating at our observatory for some time, or CHORD (The Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector), which is currently under construction, are inherently multipurpose. They can observe large areas of sky at the same time, and digitize the data in a way that minimizes any loss of information. In that way the instruments can be used for many projects at the same time. For example, the CHIME radio telescope was designed to map structure in the young universe. However, it has also proved to be a cutting-edge instrument for detecting fast radio bursts, which are fractions of a second long and can come from anywhere in the sky. We are still not sure what they are. In addition, the telescope output is recorded for later analysis, so that it can be used for later projects.<\/p>\n
Instruments like these are indications of the way astronomical science is changing. An extreme example is what will be, and may remain, the largest radio telescope in the world, the Square Kilometre Array, or SKA. This instrument will comprise thousands of antennas, located in South Africa and Australia, where there is a good view of the southern sky and the centre of our galaxy. Canada is a partner in this project. Instruments like this involve large, multinational investments and have complex engineering requirements.<\/p>\n
The need to record data that is as widely useful as possible means collecting huge amounts of it. To make it accessible, it will be stored in repositories scattered around the world, such as the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre. There will be more and more of these multipurpose telescopes, each producing a tsunami of data, and we will need tools to help search it for whatever it is that we are looking for.<\/p>\n
Artificial intelligence is already proving an important assistant in mining into the data, looking for what we seek, or something unusual. If it draws our attention to something unexpected, should it get some of the credit for the discovery?<\/p>\n
It is becoming increasingly the case where astronomers will not go to observatories for data. They would only be in the way.<\/p>\n
The first step in any new research project will be to search the data repositories to see whether suitable data has been recorded already. It might not be as much fun, but this new way of working is much more efficient.
***
Venus lies low in the west after sunset. Saturn rises in the late evening, and Mars rises shortly before dawn. The Moon will be Full on the 29th.<\/p>\n
Ken Tapping is an astronomer with the National Research Council\u2019s Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in the Okanagan. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Column: The New Astronomy Published 5:10 am Wednesday, July 29, 2026 By Ken Tapping Guest Columnist When I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":833780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-833779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=833779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/833780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=833779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=833779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=833779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}