The Expanded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope

Abstract

With 30 antennas and a maximum baseline length of 25 km, the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) is the premier low-frequency radio interferometer today. We have carried out a study of possible expansions of the GMRT, via adding new antennas and installing focal plane arrays (FPAs), to improve its point-source sensitivity, surface brightness sensitivity, angular resolution, field of view, and U-V coverage. We have carried out array configuration studies, aimed at minimizing the number of new GMRT antennas required to obtain a well-behaved synthesized beam over a wide range of angular resolutions for full-synthesis observations. This was done via two approaches, tomographic projection and random sampling, to identify the optimal locations for the new antennas. We report results for the optimal locations of the antennas of an expanded array (the "EGMRT"), consisting of the existing 30 GMRT antennas, 30 new antennas at short distances, $\le 2.5$ km from the array centre, and 26 new antennas at long distances, $\approx 5-25$ km from the array centre. The collecting area and the field of view of the proposed EGMRT array would be larger by factors of, respectively, $\approx 3$ and $\approx 30$, than those of the GMRT. Indeed, the EGMRT continuum sensitivity and survey speed with 550-850 MHz FPAs installed on the 45 antennas within a distance of $\approx 2.5$ km of the array centre would be far better than those of any existing interferometer, and comparable to the sensitivity and survey speed of Phase-1 of the Square Kilometre Array.

16 pages, 13 figures; accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (20)

• A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin
• Particle Acceleration on Megaparsec Scales in a Merging Galaxy Cluster
• A low-frequency radio halo associated with a cluster of galaxies
• FIGGS: Faint Irregular Galaxies GMRT Survey - Overview, observations and first results
• GMRT Radio Halo Survey in galaxy clusters at z = 0.2 -- 0.4. II.The eBCS clusters and analysis of the complete sample
• The Case for Electron Re-Acceleration at Galaxy Cluster Shocks
• GMRT Radio Halo Survey in galaxy clusters at z = 0.2 -- 0.4 I.The REFLEX sub--sample
• The HI content of star-forming galaxies at z = 0.24
• Discovery of PSR J1227-4853: A transition from a low-mass X-ray binary to a redback millisecond pulsar
• Cosmic rays and Radio Halos in galaxy clusters : new constraints from radio observations
• Probing radio source environments via HI and OH absorption
• The Extended GMRT Radio Halo Survey II: Further results and analysis of the full sample
• GMRT observations of X-shaped radio sources
• Mega parsec relativistic jets launched from an accreting supermassive blackhole in an extreme spiral galaxy
• Deep 610-MHz GMRT observations of the Spitzer extragalactic First Look Survey field - I. Observations, data analysis and source catalogue
• Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope monitoring of the black hole X-ray binary, V404 Cygni, during its June 2015 outburst
• Discovery of a new, 2.2 Mpc Giant Radio Galaxy at a redshift of 0.57
• Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope detection of two new HI 21cm absorbers at $z\approx 2$
• The Expanded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope
• Simulations of imaging extended sources using the GMRT and the U-GMRT: Implications to observing strategies

Cited by in corpus (4)

• EP240414a: Off-axis View of a Jet-Cocoon System from an Expanded Progenitor Star
• The Expanded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope
• Statistical Detection of IGM Structures during Cosmic Reionization using Absorption of the Redshifted 21 cm line by HI against Compact Background Radio Sources
• A Comparison of the UV and HI Properties of the Extended UV (XUV) Disk Galaxies NGC 2541, NGC 5832 and ESO406-042