THE EXPANDED VERY LARGE ARRAY: A NEW TELESCOPE FOR NEW SCIENCE

By R. Perley, C. J. Chandler, Bryan J. Butler, J. Wrobel. 2011

301 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since its commissioning in 1980, the Very Large Array (VLA) has consistently demonstrated its scientific productivity. However, its fundamental capabilities have changed little since 1980, particularly in the key areas of sensitivity, frequency coverage, and velocity resolution. These limitations have been addressed by a major upgrade of the array, which began in 2001 and will be completed at the end of 2012. When completed, the Expanded VLA—the EVLA—will provide complete frequency coverage from 1 to 50 GHz, a continuum sensitivity of typically 1 μJy beam−1 (in 9 hr with full bandwidth), and a modern correlator with vastly greater capabilities and flexibility than the VLA's. In this Letter, we describe the goals of the EVLA project, its current status, and the anticipated expansion of capabilities over the next few years. User access to the array through the Open Shared Risk Observing and Resident Shared Risk Observing programs is described. The following papers in this special issue, derived from observations in its early science period, demonstrate the astonishing breadth of this most flexible and powerful general-purpose telescope.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8fdd1a878af693aeaff148f6e899700e87dcc689

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. F. Walter
2. C. Casey
3. L. Hernquist
4. P. Hopkins
5. D. M. Alexander
6. D. Narayanan
7. E. Berger
8. C. Carilli

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Judd D. Bowman
2. C. Carilli
3. S. Chapman
4. R. Ivison
5. Randall B. Wayth
6. C. Casey
7. A. Cooray
8. H. Ratcliffe

In Instrumentation

1. C. Casey
2. F. Walter
3. A. Cooray
4. R. Ivison
5. E. Daddi
6. C. Carilli
7. D. M. Alexander
8. W. N. Brandt

Citations in the corpus

• A review of solar type III radio bursts (2014, methodology): “In North America there is the recently upgraded Expanded Very Large Array (Perley et al., 2011) (EVLA) that operates between 1 GHz and 50 GHz and has started solar observing at the end of 2011.”
• The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS). Science Case and Survey Design (2019, background): “…advent of wide bandwidth backends has increased the sensitivity of radio interferometers such as the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA; Perley et al. 2011) to radio continuum emission by a factor of several, as well as providing instantaneous frequency-dependent flux density and…”
• Cool Gas in High-Redshift Galaxies (2013, background): “…the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, ALMA (Wootten & Thompson 2009; Andreani 2010), and the Karl J. Jansky Very Large Array, JVLA (Perley et al. 2011), both of which promise to explore this evolution of the universal molecular gas content to an order of magnitude greater level of…”
• HerMES: CANDIDATE GRAVITATIONALLY LENSED GALAXIES AND LENSING STATISTICS AT SUBMILLIMETER WAVELENGTHS (2012, methodology): “Two of the lensed SMG candidates were observed with the Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA; Perley et al. 2011) to obtain high-resolution radio interferometry at 1.4 and 7 GHz (Section 6).”
• An optimized algorithm for multiscale wideband deconvolution of radio astronomical images (2017, background): “About 2 M clean iterations were required to deconvolve the highresolution LOFAR image presented in Mahony et al. (2016), while the VLA CygA set used in §3.6 required 872 K iterations.”
• EVLA OBSERVATIONS CONSTRAIN THE ENVIRONMENT AND PROGENITOR SYSTEM OF Type Ia SUPERNOVA 2011fe (2012, methodology): “We initiated radio observations of SN 2011fe on 2011 Aug 25.8 UT (∆t ≈ 2 days after explosion) with the EVLA (Perley et al. 2011) under our program AS1015 (PI Soderberg; Chomiuk & Soderberg 2011).”
• Multimessenger observations of a flaring blazar coincident with high-energy neutrino IceCube-170922A (2018, background): “VLA/17B-403 team: We thank the NRAO for granting us DDT VLA time to observe this source and the NRAO staff for rapidly executing the observations.”
• THE ULTRAVIOLET-BRIGHT, SLOWLY DECLINING TRANSIENT PS1-11af AS A PARTIAL TIDAL DISRUPTION EVENT (2013, methodology): “The latter two observations were conducted with the new WIDAR correlator (Perley et al. 2011) at a mean frequency of 5.9 GHz (lower sideband frequency centered at 5.0 GHz; upper sideband frequency centered at 6.75 GHz).”
• GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky Murchison Widefield Array (GLEAM) survey - I. A low-frequency extragalactic catalogue (2016, methodology): “Surveys are currently being performed by a range of established telescopes, such as the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT; Swarup et al. 1991) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA; Perley et al. 2011).”
• EVIDENCE FOR A CLUMPY, ROTATING GAS DISK IN A SUBMILLIMETER GALAXY AT z = 4 (2012, methodology): “We therefore obtained over 120 hours of time on the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA; Perley et al. 2011) to image the CO(2–1) emission in the GN20 field in the B– and D–configurations.”
• On the origin of a highly dispersed coherent radio burst (2012, background): “…repeat, and as the numbers detected should rise dramatically with the onset of the ‘all-sky transient monitoring’ capabilities of LOFAR (Stappers et al. 2011), the VLA (Perley et al. 2011), MeerKAT (Booth et al. 2009), ASKAP (Johnston et al. 2008) and ultimately the SKA (Colegate & Clarke 2011).”
• A DECADE OF SHORT-DURATION GAMMA-RAY BURST BROADBAND AFTERGLOWS: ENERGETICS, CIRCUMBURST DENSITIES, AND JET OPENING ANGLES (2015, background): “The large majority of events, 53 (88%), were observed with the VLA (Table A3), 28 of which were observed with the upgraded VLA, which has a ten-fold improvement in sensitivity (Perley et al. 2011).”
• A PANCHROMATIC VIEW OF THE RESTLESS SN 2009ip REVEALS THE EXPLOSIVE EJECTION OF A MASSIVE STAR ENVELOPE (2013, methodology): “We observed the position of SN 2009ip with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA; Perley et al. 2011) on multiple epochs beginning 2012 September 26.10 (tpk − 7 days), with the last epoch beginning 2012 Dec 2.93 (tpk + 61 days).”
• REGULARITY UNDERLYING COMPLEXITY: A REDSHIFT-INDEPENDENT DESCRIPTION OF THE CONTINUOUS VARIATION OF GALAXY-SCALE MOLECULAR GAS PROPERTIES IN THE MASS-STAR FORMATION RATE PLANE (2013, unknown): “…et al. 2005, Maiolino et al. 2007, Tacconi et al. 2008) and following improvements in the sensitivity of millimeter receivers (Chenu et al. 2007, Perley et al. 2011), dedicated studies of typical MS galaxies were undertaken (e.g., Daddi et al. 2008, 2010a, Tacconi et al. 2010, Geach et al.…”