Research

CHARTS

Chilean/Canadian Hydrogen Array for Realtime Transient Studies

Researchers assembling the CHARTS aperture-array antenna field outside Santiago, Chile.
Laying out the CHARTS aperture array at the site outside Santiago, Chile.

CHARTS is a new all-sky aperture array under development outside Santiago, Chile, in partnership with colleagues at Chilean universities. With a field of view of ~π steradian — roughly a quarter of the sky in a single snapshot — it is designed to search the nearby Universe for Fast Radio Bursts, where the local population includes the Galactic Centre and a number of known magnetars.

CHARTS sits almost antipodal to Taiwan's BURSTT, an all-sky monitor with a similar design targeting similar science from the opposite chunk of sky. Together with BURSTT and the Owens Valley CASM array in the northern hemisphere, CHARTS extends nearby-Universe FRB monitoring across the full sky. A design overview is published as Vanderlinde et al. (IEEE 2025).

Initial seed funding via the Dunlap Institute and Chile's QUIMAL program (2023). Site characterization and prototype hardware are underway.