Impact Report

Hank Corbett develops tools for detecting fast, rare cosmic events, strengthening our ability to catch phenomena that often unfold in minutes. These discoveries shape everything from our understanding of star death to models of the evolving universe.

The Argus Array is a revolutionary telescope system that will be the first large telescope capable of observing the entire Northern night sky at once and identifying rare cosmic events in real time.

Hank Corbett is a research scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences. He builds software and instruments to detect fast, rare cosmic events — like stellar explosions that play out on timescales between minutes and days. He leads the data pipelines for the Argus Array, which will be one of the biggest telescopes in the world and the first large telescope to observe the entire Northern night sky at once.

How did you discover your specific field of study?

I was mainly a musician through high school and into college and didn’t catch the astronomy bug in earnest until a first-year seminar at Guilford College that explored science through science fiction. The professor, Don Smith, was an astronomer, and I ended up splitting my time between music and physics degrees. A mentor there shaped the hands-on, instrument-building approach I still take today, and an early connection to UNC-Chapel Hill’s Skynet robotic telescope network introduced me to chasing transient events like gamma-ray bursts (GRB) — one of the most powerful energy events in the known universe.

One evening during a public observing session, Don mentioned — half-jokingly, I think — that he saw a flash in the sky that we briefly thought might be a GRB counterpart. In hindsight, it was almost certainly a reflection from space debris, but the underlying idea that the sky is always changing and we’re missing most of it is what drew me in and kept me here.

Academics are problem-solvers. Describe a research challenge you’ve faced and how you overcame it.

When we built the Evryscope Fast Transient Engine — a data pipeline for a north-south pair of ultra-wide-field telescopes — we needed to relay real-time detections of stellar explosions to the professional operators at the SOAR 4.1-meter telescope in Chile so they could repoint the telescope for follow-up observations.

This was in 2020, so the entire team was working remotely. We explored automation, connecting software applications, and various messaging platforms, each of which introduced its own complexity and bottlenecks. In the end, the solution that worked best was writing the coordinates on a whiteboard and holding it up to a webcam. It’s a lesson I keep relearning: The simplest approach that meets the requirement is usually the right one.

Describe your research in five words.

Building the biggest little telescope.

Who or what inspires you? Why?

The process of creating tools that enable new capabilities. Most of my work involves building something that didn’t exist before — a pipeline, an instrument, a data system — and then using it to find things no one has seen yet. There’s a particular satisfaction in watching a tool you built make a real discovery for the first time.

If you could pursue any other career, what would it be and why?

I’d go back to music. I was a classical guitar major as an undergrad. People often ask if it’s a left-brain/right-brain connection, but honestly, the overlap is more practical than that: Both are very methodical, often technique-focused, and often require a genuine tolerance for tedium.