Joshua L. Goodeve

About

Hi! I'm Josh. I grew up in the coastal community of Brentwood Bay, about a half-hour drive outside of Victoria, on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. I'm incredibly fortunate to be from this beautiful part of the world, which I feel shaped a lot of who I am today. Nature, the mountains, the ocean, and a good hike are never far from my mind.

Even from when I was pretty young, I've been interested in all kinds of things. My father, an engineer with a PhD and a pilot, got me into computers and aviation, and my mother helped develop a deep appreciation for the natural world. I also became deeply fascinated with world history and creative pursuits. I love creative writing, and I write music; I play acoustic guitar and harmonica. Since both of my parents were born outside of Canada, I travelled a lot growing up. This was mostly to Europe, but I've also travelled to Japan, and in high school I payed my way to travel as part of a class to Kochi, in India, where we worked to renovate an elementary school using building materials that us students had also raised all of the funds for. The money that went towards this trip is what would've gone to finishing my pilot's license.

My interest in space science began in middle school, where I became fascinated in spaceflight and space exploration. As I came to appreciate the unbelievable scale of space, and just how recently we've been able to learn about it, I got hooked on astronomy, and especially the biggest questions of all, about cosmology, and how astronomy can help us understand some of the most fundamental rules of our universe. Even in high school, I was completely certain that I wanted to study Physics and Astronomy. I received my BSc from the University of Victoria in 2024, and I am now finishing my MSc as a member of two research groups at the Trottier Space Institute, a part of McGill University in Montreal, Canada: the Cosmic Dawn group, headed by Dr. Adrian Liu, which is focused on tracing the early evolution of structure in our universe, and McGill Extreme Gravity and Accretion (MEGA) group, headed by Dr. Daryl Haggard, which champions 'multimessenger' astronomy, using light from across the electromagnetic spectrum, and the exciting new technique of gravitational wave astronomy, to study the most extreme objects in our universe, black holes.

By trying new things, I'm working on finding balance in my life. I love my research, and I've also learned to make plenty of time for the other things I enjoy. I've ridden motorcycles on racetracks, am a (very) amateur surfer, and I try to play at open mics and such live music events as much as I can. I live in Montreal with my amazing partner Amanda, and our cat June.

Welcome to my site! Here you can find information about my research, my professional CV, and contact details.

Research

My current research, which I'm doing for my MSc, is at the intersection of my greatest astronomical passions: radio astronomy, extreme gravity, and cosmology. The Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and transient Detector ('CHORD') is a radio telescope currently under construction in Penticton, British Columbia. I am evaluating CHORD as a potential detector of faint, slowly evolving transient radio signals.

While CHORD's main science goals are to map neutral hydrogen in the post-reionization universe and search for fast radio bursts, several of its design features may make it an excellent instrument for another science goal: searching for slow radio transients. Unlike FRBs, which last much less than a second, slow radio transients evolve over timescales of weeks to decades, requiring repeated, sensitive observations to detect. Sources of this slowly evolving radio emission and of great scientific interest, including tidal disruption events (TDEs; when a supermassive black hole eats a wayward star), neutron star mergers, and more.

CHORD has several properties that could make it a great slow transient detector. For one, CHORD will be very sensitive: it has excellent low-noise electronics, and with its 512 dishes, will have an enormous collecting area of about 14,000 square metres (comparable to the famous VLA!). As a drift-scan telescope, CHORD will stay fixed in place as the sky rotates overhead, and so CHORD will naturally observe the same patch of sky repeatedly, facilitating the repeated observations which need to be done to search for slow transients. Finally, with its low-frequency (<1.5GHz) and small dishes (6m diameter), CHORD will have a very large field of view, observing hundreds of square degrees of the sky every night, helping us search for these rare events.

Unfortunately, CHORD will also have significant drawbacks for such a search. For one, CHORD was not built with precision imaging in mind; its regular antenna layout is excellent for precise cosmology, but makes for very messy, complete with fake sources (or 'aliases'), and with low overall resolution. Given how faint the slow transients are, they will be muddled in with a background of unresolved, or 'confused' sources.

My current research is about evaluating CHORD as a slow transient detector. Do its issues make it too difficult to utilize its unique strengths? Can new techniques be found to search for slow transients that aren't required for other instruments? To discover this, I'm simulating observations of a realistic radio sky, complete with simulated transients, and am trying to come up with ways to search for them, using the unique time and frequency structure of the real transients compared to the backgrounds they sit on. To this end, I work with the spectral line working group within the CHORD collaboration, as they are also interested in faint imaging applications. At the moment, the outcome of my project hangs in the balance, as CHORD's drawbacks do indeed make it very difficult to positively identify real transients without a massive risk of false positive detections, but there are still plenty of avenues to explore!

Projects

Placeholder for now, but check out my CV where my past projects are listed in full!

CV

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Contact

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Elements

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