LOFAR tagged posts

By a stroke of luck, a team led by Dutch Ph.D. student Martijn Oei has discovered a radio galaxy of at least 16 million light-years long. The pair of plasma plumes is the largest structure made by a galaxy known thus far. The finding disproves some long-kept hypotheses about the growth of radio galaxies.

A supermassive black hole lurks in the center of many galaxies, which slows down the birth of new stars and therefore strongly influences the lifecycle of the galaxy as a...

Using the world’s most powerful radio antenna, scientists have discovered stars unexpectedly blasting out radio waves, possibly indicating the existence of hidden planets.

The University of Queensland’s Dr Benjamin Pope and colleagues at the Dutch national observatory ASTRON have been searching for planets using the world’s most powerful radio telescope Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) situated in the Netherlands.

“We’ve discovered signals from 19 distant red dwarf stars, four of which are best explained by the existence of planets orbiting them,” Dr Pope said.

“We’ve long known that the planets of our own solar system emit powerful radio waves as their magnetic fields interact with the solar wind, but radio signals from planets outside our solar system had yet to be picked up.

By connecting two of the biggest radio telescopes in the world, astronomers have discovered that a simple binary wind cannot cause the puzzling periodicity of a fast radio burst after all. The bursts may come from a highly magnetized, isolated neutron star...

Astronomers have published the most detailed images seen of galaxies beyond our own yet, revealing their inner workings in unprecedented detail.

The images were created from data collected by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a network of more than 70,000 small antennae spread across nine European countries. 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).

As well as supporting science exploitation, STFC also fu...