Cavendish Astrophysics Group

The Cavendish Astrophysics Group (formerly the Radio Astronomy Group) is based at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. 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 Cambridge University.

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 telescopes

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
• Various aperture masking instruments for optical aperture synthesis

Catalogues published by the group

• 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

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, head of Cavendish Laboratory
• Jocelyn Bell Burnell, detected the first signal from a pulsar

Links

Cavendish Astrophysics Group webpage