Exoplanet Sparks Stellar Fireworks
Astronomers have witnessed a planet causing storms to erupt on its parent star, a discovery that could reshape our understanding of how planets and stars interact and evolve together. These findings are published today in the scientific journal Nature.
New ‘mini halo’ discovery deepens our understanding of how the early Universe was formed
Astronomers have uncovered a vast cloud of energetic particles – a ‘mini halo’ – surrounding one of the most distant galaxy clusters ever observed, using the LOFAR radio telescope, marking a major step forward in understanding the hidden forces that shape the cosmos.
An Earth-sized radio observatory just got better: South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope joins forces with the European VLBI Network of telescopes
South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope has successfully conducted very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations with telescopes of the European VLBI Network (EVN)—currently the world’s most sensitive VLBI network. Their synergy sets a new standard for global collaboration and significantly enhances both resolution and sensitivity, opening new avenues for scientific exploration.
All sky, all the time – A new radio sky monitor for transients and technosignatures
Breakthrough Listen, headquartered at the University of Oxford – the most ambitious project to date searching for technosignatures (signs of technology as an indicator of extraterrestrial intelligence) – is partnering with ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and the University of Manchester, to deploy a new all-sky monitor at the Westerbork Observatory in the Netherlands. The new experiment takes phased array feeds (PAFs) – essentially wide-field radio cameras – that were previously deployed on the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), and installs them on the ground, looking up at the sky directly.
Enhancing the Value and Sustainability of LOFAR Science Archive
© LDV team
LDV is reaching the conclusion of its first phase of operations at Surf. The storage occupancy was reduced by 7.5 PB through resampling of beam formed data, compression of interferometric data and a large data placement action. This gain in storage translates in a saving of about 56 kEuro/yr. Curation of data enabled the removal of duplicates and the addition of quality flags. Currently, preparations are ongoing to perform a major retirement action (~9.5 PB distributed over the three LTA sites) of the early cycles (0-6) archived data with no legacy value.
The next operational aim at Surf is the generation of higher level data products by running the LOFAR Initial Calibration (LINC) pipeline on a significant portion of the archived data. For the first time, calibrated visibilities through the observatory processing framework with latest workflows will be offered to the astronomical community.
Furthermore efforts are ongoing to extend the processing framework infrastructure at the Juelich LTA site, for enabling the next round of data editing operations with an expected duration of 1 year. As a result more than 4 PB of tape storage space will be gained. Looking ahead, the LDV processing infrastructure will be expanded to support the LOFAR2.0 MPS operations, marking a key step toward future-ready science operations.
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.