This infographic shows the ‘evolution’ of supercomputers used for LOFAR.

The LOFAR Transient Buffer Board (TBB) gave the LOFAR radio telescope a unique extra capability: looking back in time.

The day-to-day LOFAR operations require highly specialized monitoring and control systems. We use a system that easily enables us to visualize any values we put in our database in a graphic interface or time-sequenced graphs.

With the help of LOFAR, astronomers have been able to indicate the presence of a planet around a red dwarf star and with that, prove a theory that was composed with observations of Jupiter and its moon Io.

The LOFAR Transient Buffer Board (TBB) gave the LOFAR radio telescope a unique extra capability: looking back in time.

It has been known since the 1970s that the radio structures made by jets from black holes come in two types: very powerful jets are brightest at the edges and weaker jets are brightest in the middle and fade out at large distances.

In 2013 an international research team – led by Dutch astronomers (SRON, NOVA and ASTRON) – discovers that pulsar PSR B0943+10 can both radically change the amounts of radio waves and X-ray waves it emits within seconds.

In 2017 LOFAR detects the slowest spinning radio pulsar to date. The neutron star spins around once only every 23.5 seconds almost three times more slowly than the slowest spinning radio pulsar detected up to that point (8.5 seconds).

In the Netherlands, the LOFAR telescope consists of approximately 40 antenna stations that are spread over the entire North of the Netherlands. The amount of LOFAR data that needs to be transferred from these stations is so large that it cannot be sent via the regular Internet.

This infographic explains how LOFAR treats data collected by its stations.

LOFAR is the first radio telescope of its size, wherein tens of thousands of small antenna elements are used instead of a few big dishes, as was more common in radio astronomy. All these antennas generate enormous amounts of data 24/7.

Although the saying goes ‘lightning never strikes the same place twice’, in fact it often does. Why it does so however, has long remained a mystery, but in 2019 a team of scientists led by the University of Groningen (RUG) used LOFAR to shed light on this matter.