Nicholas Law

• Program

  Argus

• Institution

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Nicholas Law is the PI of the Argus Array project. The 50-gigapixel array is planned to be the first large telescope to cover the enHre sky simultaneously: an 8,000 square degree field of view with 5m-class collecHng area, 1.4”/pixel sampling, and all-sky cadences as fast as 1 second. Law received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, developing the first EMCCD-based lucky imaging system for high-angular-resoluHon imaging. As a postdoc at Caltech he was Project ScienHst for the Palomar Transient Factory Hme-domain survey which, among dozens of discoveries, idenHfied several new types of supernova. Also at Caltech, Law was Project ScienHst, opHcal testbed designer and pipeline lead for Robo-AO, the first roboHc laser adapHve system. As the inaugural Dunlap Fellow at University of Toronto, Law designed and built the AWCams, the first astronomical survey to be performed in the High Canadian ArcHc, near the North Pole. Law started as faculty at UNC Chapel Hill in 2013, where he and his students invented, built and operate the Evryscope all-sky Hme-domain astronomy survey network. The gigapixel-scale Evryscopes cover the enHre sky every two minutes from sites in Chile and California. Their datasets have been used for a wide variety of surveys, including the discovery of the first opHcal superflare from Proxima Centauri. Law’s group is currently focused on the commissioning of the Argus Pathfinder array, designed to pioneer and validate the Argus Array technologies while achieving an order-of-magnitude leap in our capability to explore the sky at high speeds.