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Astronomers Astonished: Enigmatic Distant Radio Bursts Appear to be Neutron Stars

Using the radio telescope at Westerbork, The Netherlands, astronomers have discovered two dozen of the unexplained Fast Radio Bursts. After zooming in on the signal of the distant bursts, the astronomers found a striking similarity to the radio flashes emitted by nearby, known neutron stars. The discovery is remarkable because these nearby neutron stars already produce more energy than anything achievable on Earth. The distant stars that emit the Fast Radio Bursts must somehow generate an astounding one billion times more energy than the nearby ones.

Astronomy
News
Science
WSRT-APERTIF
Published by the editorial team, 23 January 2025

European Pulsar Timing Array Wins Two Prestigious Awards

The European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) has been honored with two major awards for its groundbreaking work in gravitational wave astronomy. In 2024, the team received the International Congress of Basic Sciences (ICBS) Frontiers of Science Award in China, followed by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Group Achievement Award in the United Kingdom in 2025.These accolades celebrate the team’s innovative use of pulsar timing to detect low-frequency gravitational waves. The EPTA is a collaborative effort involving scientists from more than ten institutions across Europe. ASTRON is one of the participating organisations in this project with its most sensitive radio telescope including the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope. (WSRT).

Astronomy
News
Science
WSRT-APERTIF
Published by the editorial team, 16 January 2025

Roelien Attema named as Netherlands Academy of Engineering Fellow

ASTRON’s head of the Innovation & Systems department, Roelien Attema, has been named as one of the ten new Fellows of the Netherlands Academy of Engineering (NAE). The appointment recognises her outstanding achievements in technology valorisation and visionary leadership in research and development.

News
Published by the editorial team, 12 December 2024

Using short radio flashes to probe the remnants of neutron star mergers

What happens after neutron stars merge? Dr. Antonia Rowlinson has received an ERC Consolidator Grant to find an answer to that fundamental question.

Astronomy
LOFAR
News
telescopes
Published by the editorial team, 4 December 2024

LOFAR1 operations stopped, telescope gearing up for 2.0 upgrade

August 31st was the last day on which we received data from LOFAR1. With the shutdown of LOFAR1 operations, over a decade of gathering and handling huge amounts of data came to an end. LOFAR1 operations have led to the publication of more than 750 scientific papers so far, and this number is still growing by about two papers per week. The end of LOFAR1 production operations does of course not mean the end of LOFAR (which became LOFAR ERIC last year): right now we are working hard on upgrading the LOFAR telescope to version 2.0, both in software and hardware.

LOFAR
News
Published by the editorial team, 25 September 2024

Gargantuan Black Hole Jets Are Biggest Seen Yet

Astronomers have spotted the biggest pair of black hole jets ever seen, spanning 23 million light-years in total length. That’s equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back to back.

Astronomy
LOFAR
News
telescopes
Published by the editorial team, 19 September 2024
EVENTS

CASPER Workshop 2025

Mon 08 Sep 2025 - Fri 12 Sep 2025

The CASPER workshop is a semi-annual workshop where FPGA, GPU, and general heterogeneous system programmers get together to discuss new instruments in radio astronomy, as well as the tools and libraries for developing and manipulating these instruments.

DAILY IMAGE
Colloquium: Pushing LOFAR to its limits with ultra-deep, high-resolution, wide-field imaging

© Jurjen de Jong

Recently, we have successfully imaged several LOFAR deep fields at the highest resolutions (e.g. Lockman Hole, ELAIS-N1, and Boötes), revealing the universe in unprecedented detail at the lowest frequencies. However, this has come at the expense of significant computing resources and extensive manual intervention, making it unsustainable for large-scale surveys or ultra-deep wide-field imaging. In this talk, I will discuss recent progress in developing the LOFAR VLBI pipeline for wide-field imaging, techniques to reduce the computational costs by up to a factor of 10 for ultra-deep imaging, and replacing manual interventions with automation and AI, making us ready for the LOFAR 2.0 era.

@astron

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