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.
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.
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.
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.
Rapthor image of the 3C 61.1 field
© CC
This is a challenging field to image, because of the very bright, resolved source in the centre (3C 61.1). It is for the first time that a pipeline can make such a high fidelity LOFAR image of this source and the rest of the field. Accurate modeling of 3C 61.1 is important, because this source is inside one of the fields being used by the LOFAR Epoch of Reionization team. For that science case, foregrounds like 3C 61.1 are overshining the signal of interest, and need to be removed from the data.
3C 61.1 was one of the first sources being looked at with LOFAR: already in 2009, it was imaged by R. van Weeren (https://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20100208).