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Owens Valley Radio Observatory

Astronomical observatories in CaliforniaBuildings and structures in Inyo County, CaliforniaCalifornia Institute of Technology buildings and structuresNew Jersey Institute of TechnologyOwens Valley
Radio observatoriesSolar observatoriesUse American English from July 2025
OVRO 40 Meter Radio Telescope
OVRO 40 Meter Radio Telescope

Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) is a radio astronomy observatory located near Big Pine, California (US) in Owens Valley. It lies east of the Sierra Nevada, approximately 350 kilometers (220 miles) north of Los Angeles and 20 kilometers (12 miles) southeast of Bishop. It was established in 1956, and is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The Owens Valley Solar Array portion of the observatory has been operated by New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) since 1997. One of the ten dish-antenna radiotelescope systems of the Very Long Baseline Array is located on a sublease within the Owens Valley observatory.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Owens Valley Radio Observatory (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Owens Valley Radio Observatory
Leighton Lane,

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N 37.2339 ° E -118.282 °
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Leighton Lane

California, United States
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OVRO 40 Meter Radio Telescope
OVRO 40 Meter Radio Telescope
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Sunyaev–Zel'dovich Array
Sunyaev–Zel'dovich Array

The Sunyaev–Zeldovich Array (SZA) in California is an array of eight 3.5 meter telescopes that was operated as part of the now-closed Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA). Its initial goals were to survey the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in order to measure its fine-scale anisotropies and to find clusters of galaxies. The survey was completed in 2007, and the array is now used primarily to characterize clusters via the Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect. Observations commenced at the SZA in April 2005. One of the most important developments of the last few years has been the detection, through observations of the CMB and supernova studies, of a form of energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. Dubbed dark energy by analogy with dark matter, it is believed to account for roughly 70% of the universe's energy content. While dark energy cannot be observed directly, its basic properties can be inferred from its effect on structure formation in the universe. Just as an ecologist can learn about the food supply by studying how animal populations evolve with time, physicists can learn about dark energy by studying the population statistics of the universe's inhabitants—in this case, galaxy clusters. The SZA gets its name from the means by which it measures galaxy clusters: the scattering of CMB light as it passes through the hot ionized cluster gas, known as the Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect (SZ effect). In short, the CMB is used as a backlight against which galaxy clusters can be seen by the shadows they cast. Since the SZA sees the shadow rather than the light emitted by the cluster itself, it can be used to measure sufficiently large clusters nearly independently of their redshift, back to the epoch at which clusters first began to form.