Cavendish Astrophysics Group

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The Cavendish Astrophysics Group (formerly the Radio Astronomy Group) is based at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. The group operates all of the telescopes at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory except for the 32m MERLIN telescope, which is operated by Jodrell Bank.

The group is the second largest of three astronomy departments in the University of Cambridge.

Contents 1 Instruments under development by the group 2 Existing / previous instruments 3 Catalogues published by the group 4 Famous Group Members 5 External links

[edit] Instruments under development by the group

• A Heterodyne Array Receiver for B-band (HARP-B) at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope
• The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) - several modules of this international project
• The Arcminute Microkelvin Imager (AMI)
• The Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MRO Interferometer)
• The Planck Surveyor
• The Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope (COAST)
• The Extended Very Small Array
• The CLOVER telescope

[edit] Existing / previous instruments

• The 5km Ryle Telescope
• The Cosmic Anisotropy Telescope
• The Cambridge Low Frequency Synthesis Telescope
• The Half-Mile Telescope
• The One-Mile Telescope
• The Interplanetary Scintillation Array which discovered the first pulsar
• The 4C Array which made the 4C catalogue
• The Cambridge Interferometer
• The Long Michelson Interferometer
• Various aperture masking instruments for optical aperture synthesis

[edit] Catalogues published by the group

• Preliminary survey of the radio stars in the Northern Hemisphere (sometimes called the 1C catalogue) at 81.5-MHz (unreliable at low flux levels)
• 2C catalogue 81.5-MHz (unreliable at low flux levels)
• 3C catalogue 159-MHz
• 4C catalogue 178-MHz
• 5C catalogue 408-MHz and 1407-MHz
• 6C catalogue 151-MHz
• 7C catalogue 151-MHz
• 8C catalogue 38-MHz
• 9C catalogue 15-GHz
• Cambridge Interplanetary Scintillation survey

[edit] Famous Group Members

• Sir Martin Ryle, 1918-1984, Nobel Prize for Physics, founder of the group, former British Astronomer Royal
• Tony Hewish, Nobel Prize for Physics, designed the telescope which discovered the first pulsars
• Malcolm Longair Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy, former head of the Cavendish Laboratory
• Jocelyn Bell Burnell, detected the first signal from a pulsar
• John E. Baldwin
• Richard E. Hills
• F. Graham Smith - early co-worker with Ryle, later Astronomer-Royal

[edit] External links

• Cavendish Astrophysics Group webpage