Astronomer Nicholas Law leads Argus Array project

Nicholas Law standing next to a telescope with a celestial backdrop. — Nicholas Law, head of the Argus Array project, poses with an Argus Array telescope beneath the Milky Way projected onto the dome of the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center. (Megan Mendenhall/UNC Research)

Nicholas Law, a professor of physics and astronomy in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, uses Evryscope to search for new planets outside our solar system and even to assess their habitability.

Evryscope — Greek for “wide-seer”— comprises twin telescope systems in the mountains of Chile and California, looking like massive white helmets equipped with telescopes that peer through 27 windows at different pieces of the sky.

Now Law, Evryscope project leader, is moving on to the Argus Array, which, once completed, will be the world’s largest and most powerful telescope survey system. Funding for the project comes from Schmidt Sciences and Alex Gerko, founder of XTX Markets.

Nick Law examines the inner workings of a benchtop mechanical prototype.

Clusters of Argus Array telescopes will be mounted on machinery that will move and rotate the telescopes to capture the full night sky. Prototypes like this one Law is working on help the team fine-tune the mechanics. (Megan Mendenhall/UNC Research.)

The Argus Array will create the first full-time, high-resolution video of the entire northern sky — enabling the visualization of fleeting events that other telescopes can’t capture — and will make the data publicly available to be used by astronomers worldwide. The unprecedented amount of information the array will produce could truly revolutionize the study of the cosmos.

The Argus Array is the next logical step for Law. As a postdoctoral researcher, he set up a telescope near the North Pole to monitor the stars continuously over the darkest winter months and generated impressive data. Law wondered what kind of data a bundle of such telescopes could produce and found out working with Everyscope. And if a system of 27 small telescopes was successful, why not a system of hundreds of much larger ones?

Three rows of telescopes pointing upwards.

The Argus Array will consist of 1,200 individual telescopes grouped into flower-like clusters and aligned in the shape of a massive bowl. (Submitted photo)

A design born of necessity

Law named the Argus Array after a subspace telescope featured in an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Its original design resembled a much larger Evryscope — a massive fiberglass dome with telescopes peering out through hundreds of windows. But the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into Law’s plans to build the prototype in 2020.

With no fiberglass manufacturers available to build the project, Law went back to the drawing board, eventually turning the dome design inside out. Instead of pointing outward from a dome, each scope would point into the middle of a bowl.

“If all the telescopes point inwards, they can look through a single window,” Law said. “That turns the enclosure into something any contractor can build — essentially, a building with a skylight.”

The National Science Foundation funded the development of Argus Pathfinder, a 38-scope prototype that allowed Law’s team to fine-tune their new “pseudofocal concept” and demonstrate its performance.

The Argus Array project became part of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System, a network of one space and three ground telescopes that may revolutionize the collection of astronomical data. Last year, to take advantage of new sensor technology that emerged in early 2025, Schmidt Sciences expanded its funding, and Gerko came onboard as a co-funder, effectively doubling the size of the array. Argus will now feature a total of 1,200 telescopes.

The system will be equipped to capture a continuous, 122-gigapixel movie of the entire northern sky — 35 times more pixels than the previous largest digital camera. Everyscope takes a picture every two minutes, but the Argus Array will be 100 times faster.

“We’ll be able to make unique discoveries simply because we’re looking everywhere at once,” Law said. “We can detect things when other telescopes have to look elsewhere.”

Construction on the Argus Array is expected to finish in the mountains of Texas in 2027.

Artist's rendering of a building bearing the words "Argus Array" on a mountains overlook.

Artist’s rendering of the planned Argus Array complex in the mountains of southwest Texas, where a dark sky will allow for clear pictures of the cosmos. (Photo by Schmidt Sciences)

The promise of a powerhouse

What could such unprecedented power help astronomers explore?

One possibility is the earliest stages of supernovae, the explosive deaths of stars that are rarely observed from the beginning. Because Argus will be scanning the sky continuously, it is far more likely to capture the full event and what led to it.

“We can look back at the days and hours before — almost like a time machine — to see what’s happened in the sky,” Law said.

Another application is the search for new planets, both near and far. Current projects focus their scopes on a distant region of the Milky Way, where they can watch more stars at once. Because Argus doesn’t have to choose where to look, it may identify planets all over the sky, including ones much closer to home.

But Law emphasized that the true power of the Argus Array lies in its unlimited possibilities. Researchers around the world are already preparing to use its data for a variety of projects.

And they’ll be able to. All data from the Argus Array will rapidly be made publicly available.

“Within the first few weeks of operation, Argus will collect more data than all optical telescopes that have ever existed across their combined lifetimes,” Law said. A data center built alongside the array will use artificial intelligence to process the approximately 8,000 terabytes collected per night. Law explained that at “first light,” when the array is turned on, the project will just be beginning as graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and software engineers start to analyze the data.

The design, prototyping and construction process have already provided valuable experiences for students and postdocs at Carolina. Law expressed gratitude for the dozens of people at UNC-Chapel Hill and around the world working to make this project happen, including survey scientist Hank Corbett and program manager Alan Vasquez Soto.

“These sorts of systems allow us to do science that’s impossible any other way,” he said. “A lot of what makes this telescope work didn’t exist when we started. Now it does, and we can’t wait to bring Argus data to the world.”