The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is embarking on a bold new era of astronomical discovery with the construction of the Argus Array, a revolutionary telescope system that will be the first large telescope capable of observing the entire Northern nighttime sky at once and identifying rare cosmic events in real time.
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Rather than a single telescope, Argus is composed of an array of 1,200 small telescopes, each observing a different patch of sky. Together, they cover the entire sky in every exposure, ensuring that no transient event — from exploding stars to planetary microlensing events — goes unnoticed. The telescopes are arranged in a unique “pseudofocal” concept — an inverted bowl structure in which large groups of telescopes point inward through a single window. This configuration allows the entire array to operate inside a sealed, laboratory-like environment, protecting the sensitive optical equipment for a decade-long survey and dramatically lowering operating costs.
The Argus Array’s telescopes form a vast 122,000-megapixel camera — the world’s largest digital camera, by a factor of 30. Argus will take millions of 122-gigapixel images to build the first deep, high-speed movie of the Northern sky, discovering and following cosmic events as they happen.
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Argus will generate data at a rate of 2,000 gigabits per second, making it one of the largest producers of scientific data in the world. To deal with this vast data rate, the system will rely on high-speed computing and machine-learning algorithms to analyze data as it is collected, selecting the most interesting events and sky locations for long-term storage.
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In addition to its scientific impact, Argus will serve as a cornerstone for open data in astronomy. The project will conduct the deepest and fastest survey of the entire Northern sky to date, and the full dataset will be made publicly available — rapidly and completely.
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