European telescope reveals the low-radio-frequency universe in HD

tikker · August 18, 2021

Not really tech news, but I figured people might enjoy seeing some pretty space pictures.

Summary

After years of hard work coming up with data reduction strategies and solving associated technical challenges, astronomers have now have now published a series of recent results from the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT), demonstrating its power to shed new light on the Universe as seen at the lowest radio frequencies to reach the Earth's surface. With the ILT we can explore the low-frequency Universe in unprecedented detail and depth.

It has a nice tech aspect as well. With 72 stations spread across Europe, over 70,000 antennas work together sending data to a central location in the Netherlands where it is pre-processed (true raw data is too much to store) in real time. The entire array produces data of the order of a dozen Tbps, needing to transport data over long distances at ~150 Gbps. A few PB per year is stored in the archive. During it's start in the early 2010s this telescope was a good infrastructural workout both in terms of long distance data rates and facilitating large storage requirements.

Quotes

Quote

After almost a decade of work, an international team of astronomers has published the most detailed images yet seen of galaxies beyond our own, revealing their inner workings in unprecedented detail. The images were created from data collected by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a radio telescope built and maintained by ASTRON, LOFAR is a network of more than 70,000 small antennae spread across nine European counties, with its core in Exloo, the Netherlands. The results come from the team’s years of work, led by Dr Leah Morabito at Durham University. The team was supported in the UK by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

My thoughts

I'm part of the team and have been working on this for a few years now. I'm involved in these results, so naturally to me this is all amazing This holds great promise for the future and will help advance our understanding of black holes, (radio) galaxies and the connection between their evolution. Feel free to ask questions about any of the results or LOFAR and I'll do my best to answer them.

Sources

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57998940

https://www.astron.nl/most-detailed-ever-images-of-galaxies-revealed-using-lofar/