BVEX completes its first balloon flight campaign

lf76 — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 21:16:29 +0000

BVEX completes its first balloon flight campaign lf76 Sun, 11/23/2025 - 16:16

BVEX is ready to launch!

lf76 — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 23:54:50 +0000

BVEX is ready to launch! lf76 Thu, 08/28/2025 - 19:54

Pre-launch telescope testing

lf76 — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 12:40:17 +0000

Pre-launch telescope testing lf76 Wed, 08/20/2025 - 08:40

The BVEX Team Arrives in Timmins!

lf76 — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 19:05:37 +0000

The BVEX Team Arrives in Timmins! lf76 Mon, 08/18/2025 - 15:05

The Balloon Borne Very Large Baseline Experiment (BVEX)

lf76 — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 10:59:40 +0000

The Balloon Borne Very Large Baseline Experiment (BVEX) lf76 Tue, 08/12/2025 - 06:59

Taking high resolution radio astronomy to the stratosphere

The Balloon Borne Very Large Baseline Interferometry Experiment (BVEX) is a project aiming to improve images of the regions around supermassive black holes.

First Flight: Late August 2025

The Balloon-borne Very Long Baseline Interferometry Experiment (BVEX) is a new project, led by astrophysicists at Queen's University, with the goal of showing that radio telescopes suspended from helium balloons can join with ground-based telescopes to create an Earth-spanning radio observatory!

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) uses many telescopes at different locations on Earth to observe the same object simultaneously. By carefully correlating the observations later on powerful computers it is possible to make extremely high-resolution images. For example, VLBI has been used by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration to image the shadows of the supermassive black holes. These maps are the highest resolution images ever made in astronomy.

Our team is aiming to show that adding balloon telescopes to global VLBI networks can improve the quality of these high resolution radio images. It may also be possible to use balloon telescopes to create even higher resolution maps of the regions around supermassive black holes by observing higher frequency light not accessible to most ground based telescopes.

BVEX is the first step in adding balloon-borne radio telescopes to VLBI observatories. In the last week of August 2025 we will be launching a specially designed 0.9-meter radio telescope on a balloon gondola from the Canadian Space Agency's Timmins, Ontario Stratospheric Balloon Base. During the overnight balloon flight BVEX will rise up to 33 km above sea level, and will make observations of bright radio galaxies simultaneously with radio telescopes in North America and in Europe.

The 0.9-meter BVEX telescope mounted on the Canadian Space Agency's CARMENCITA balloon gondola in August 2025.

BVEX News and Updates

Read the latest news from the BVEX project

��ϳԹ��Դ our Team

Learn about the BVEX collaboration

Partner Institutes

Queen's University (Lead Institute)

McGill University

MIT Haystack Observatory

Centre for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

StarSpec Technologies Inc.

The Balloon-borne VLBI EXperiment (BVEX)