Major Collaborations

Planck

The Planck Space Telescope has produced the most accurate map yet of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB), and the most precise age of our universe (13.82 billion years). It collected data from 2009 – 2013 for 4 ½ years. Scientists   objectives include the study of our and other galaxies, the origin of structure in the universe, and the large scale structure and composition of the universe.

More information and updates about Planck

CHIME

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment is a partnership between the Universities of British Columbia, McGill, Toronto and the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory. It is a novel radio telescope consisting of cylindrical reflectors like snowboarding half-pipes that will measure over half the sky each day as the Earth turns to produce a  three-dimensional map of the universe ranging from 7 to 11 billion light years from Earth, the largest volume of space surveyed to date, to study dark energy.

More information and updates about CHIME

Pulsar VLBI Observation Program

CITA leads a team of researchers from the University of Toronto, in collaboration with radio astronomers in India and the Netherlands in a pioneering experiment to image pulsars with unprecedented accuracy, using the interstellar medium as a lens, and Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the use of radio telescopes at long distances from each other to represent a gathering area or dish as big as the separation between them.

More information and updates about the Pulsar Project

LIGO

LIGO,  the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, is pushing the limits of measurement to detect movements 1/1000th the diameter of a proton  between two mirrors perfectly suspended four kilometers apart caused by the passage of a gravitational wave produced by the collision of neutron stars and the vibrations of black holes.

More information and updates about LIGO

CCAT

CITA and several Canadian universities are partners in the Cerro Chajnantor Atacama Telescope, a submillimeter telescope with a 25-meter dish located at 5600 m altitude in Chile. CCAT will combine high sensitivity, a wide field of view, and a broad wavelength range to provide deep, large area multicolor surveys. It will serve the study of galaxy formation and evolution; the hot gas pervading clusters of galaxies; star formation, protoplanetary disks, and debris disks in the Milky Way galaxy.

More information and updates about CCAT