The Apertif upgrade of the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) has yielded its first scientific paper based on its images. The paper has been published in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The Apertif upgrade of the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) has yielded its first scientific paper based on its images. The paper has been published in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
From today (August 11th) up until Friday the yearly Perseids meteor shower will have its peak. This phenomenon is not only interesting for amateur astronomers, professional astronomers will be observing them as well.
The Sun’s activity appears not only in the well-known 11-year Sunspot cycle, but also in short duration eruptions as flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
The Earth receives its life-sustaining energy from Sunlight, but “explosions” on the Sun can also be life-threatening. Explosions on the Sun’s surface, called flares, can spew out large masses of plasma and harmful radiation towards the planets.
In order to receive radio signals from across the Universe, LOFAR needs to be very sensitive. The downside of that sensitivity is susceptibility to radio interference: other sources that produce radio signals that LOFAR detects, but does not want to measure.
In 2018, Italy officially joined the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT) and in the near future the LOFAR station in Italy will become operational.
An international team of astronomers, including a number of Dutch researchers, has discovered that a repeating fast radio burst (FRB) source becomes active about every sixteen days.
In 2021, ASTRON will deliver TMSS (Telescope Manager Specification System), which is a brand-new platform for the specification, administration, and scheduling of LOFAR observations.
In the LOFAR radio telescope, the observation data is synchronized over time for accurate processing of the received signals. Until now, the telescope uses GPS techniques to synchronize the observation data, achieving an accuracy between 1 ns and 10 ns.
Supermassive black holes can leave a trail of energetic particles that astronomers are able to detect using radio telescopes.
If the antennae of LOFAR are the senses of the radio telescope, then the central correlator is its brain. It is the place where all the data streams come together and are converted into astronomy data.