A trillion times visible light - viewing the Universe with the Cherenkov Telescope Array

Stefan Funk is an assistant professor at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC). Funk's research uses gamma rays - the highest energy photons - to observe the high energy Universe, populated by numerous exotic and violent phenomena, colossal explosions, supermassive black holes, rapidly rotating neutron stars and shock waves of gas moving at supersonic speeds. Many of these astrophysical objects can generate almost inconceivable amounts of energy and accelerate particles to energies way beyond those accessible in human-made accelerators. The Cherenkov Telescope Array or CTA is a project to build a next-generation ground-based gamma-ray instrument in the energy range that spans several orders of magnitude and reaches its full potential at about 1 TeV (a trillion times the energy of visible light). The talk will describe the science reach program of CTA and the status of the project.