dan @ thetelegraphic . com

Personal webpage of Danny Price, an astronomer at Curtin University (AU) and the UC Berkeley (USA). I build radio astronomy instruments for SETI, pulsars & FRBs, and 21-cm cosmology.

About Me

Hi there! My name is Danny Price, and I'm a senior postdoctoral researcher at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, as part of the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) I am the project scientist for Breakthrough Listen in Australia, so am also part of the Berkeley Seti Research Center at UC Berkeley.

I've previously worked at Swinburne University in Melbourne, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Back in 2009-2013, I did my DPhil. (PhD) in astrophysics at the University of Oxford.

Breakthrough Listen

I'm excited to be part of the Breakthrough Listen initiative: the most comprehensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) ever undertaken. We are using the largest telescopes in the world to systematically search for artificial signals of unknown origin. I am working on the digital signal processing systems and data analysis pipelines, and running the science program on the Parkes telescope in Australia.

Detecting the dark ages

I also worked on the Large Aperture Experiment to Detect the Dark Ages, or LEDA. We've built a 256-antenna array along with a powerful GPU-based correlator in Owen's Valley, California. We're looking for highly-redshifted Hydrogen in the early Universe, and will image the entire sky at radio wavelengths.

LEDA

A LEDA all-sky image at 47 MHz (data reduced by Stephen Bourke).

Searching for Fast Radio Bursts

At Swinburne University, as part of the UTMOST-2D project, we upgraded the Molonglo telescope, to convert it into a Fast Radio Burst detection and localization machine (UTMOST). Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are rare and enigmatic astrophyical events that last only a few milliseconds. They appear to originate from billions of light years away; how and why they occur remains an outstanding mystery that we are hoping to solve.

Radio astronomy instrumentation

I work mainly on digital instrumentation: designing and implementing signal processing systems for radio telescopes. I work a lot with FPGAs and I'm an active part of the CASPER collaboration. I've helped build instruments at the Parkes (HIPSR), Owen's Valley (LEDA), Medicina (BEST-2), and Tidbinbilla (TAMS) observatories.

HIPSR

HIPSR is a spectrometer and pulsar machine for the Parkes 21cm multibeam receiver.

LEDA

LEDA is a low-frequency array of 256 antennas in Owen's Valley, California.

DPAD

D-PAD was a 16-element aperture array that I built as part of my PhD project.

More about me

You might like to check out my publications (Google Scholar | ADS | arXiv), or head over to my blog . You can grab my contact details at the bottom of this page, and links to my github and linkedin pages.