Daily Image

11-04-2014
PreviousNext
Click here or on the picture for a full size image.

LOFAR Science Week 2014

Submitter: Michael Wise et al.
Description: The LOFAR Science Week for 2014 kicked off in Amsterdam this week and brought together over 150 members of the LOFAR science community. The week began on Monday afternoon with a LOFAR Users Meeting, open to the whole LOFAR community, organized by the Radio Observatory and intended to provide a forum for users to both learn about the status of the array as well as provide feedback. Members of the Radio Observatory gave updates on the current operational status, ongoing developments, and plans for the coming year. Representative users from the community were also invited to share their personal experiences from using the system. Roberto Pizzo and the Science Support team were on hand to answer questions and gathered a lot of good feedback that that the Radio Observatory will use to improve the user experience.

The Users Meeting was followed on Tuesday by a two day LOFAR Community Science Workshop where over 120 members of the LOFAR collaboration came together to present their latest science results and share ideas and experiences about doing science with LOFAR. An amazing range of results were presented including new record-breaking sub-arc imaging with LOFARs international baselines, first extragalactic detections of Carbon radio recombination lines (RRLs), the first ever 1000000:1 dynamic range image at these low frequencies, and the most sensitive upper limit on the elusive EoR signal yet obtained. In addition to these exciting science results, users also discussed ongoing work to improve the calibration and imaging capabilities of LOFAR. Updates on efforts to extend the LOFAR array were also presented by members of the French NenuFAR project, the Irish and Polish LOFAR consortia, and the KAIRA project. Its clear that LOFAR remains a growing and scientifically exciting instrument with an active scientific user community.

The final two days of the week were dedicated to a workshop focused on scientific exploitation of LOFARs first all-sky survey, the Multifrequency Snapshot Sky Survey (MSSS). Members of the MSSS team gathered together along with scientists from the wider community to discuss progress with the survey, plans for the release of survey data products, and of course getting good science out of these products. Details on the current processing for the survey were presented along with ideas and plans for improving the survey data products through future reprocessing. A first look at some of the potential science from MSSS was also presented by several of the MSSS science teams on a wide range of topics including giant radio galaxies, AGN and clusters of galaxies, transients and pulsars. The expected public data release of the first MSSS catalog and image mosaics is in early 2015 with a wide range of science papers soon to follow.
Copyright: ASTRON
 
  Follow us on Twitter
Please feel free to submit an image using the Submit page.