Event Details

The actual level of diffuse radio emission on our sky is surprisingly uncertain.  Almost all investigations that depend on understanding the radio sky, including cosmic microwave background and 21 cm cosmology foregrounds, rely on just one measurement - the 408 MHz Haslam map from the 1980s, which traces its absolute calibration to highly uncertain, low resolution blocked aperture measurements from the 1960s and earlier.  

 This talk will discuss the present situation and the project to make the first ever reliably absolutely calibrated large-scale radio map, using the unique features of the Green Bank Telescope combined with custom instrumentation. This polarization sensitive map of the whole sky North of -47 degrees declination with all Galactic latitudes observed will provide an important new resource for understanding and constraining almost all Galactic and extragalactic phenomena that manifest in, or depend on the understanding of, diffuse radio emission.