When the immense Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico collapsed in 2020, it left gaping holes in astronomy. Now, a team from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) hopes to address some of the gaps with a very different instrument: a tightly packed array of relatively inexpensive radio dishes that aims to quickly image radio sources across wide swaths of the sky. A nearly completed prototype array in California that the team calls a "radio camera" is already locating dozens of the distant, enigmatic eruptions called fast radio bursts (FRBs). Next year, the team hopes to begin construction on a much larger array with 2000 dishes that, together, will match the size of Arecibo.
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