Supermassive black holes can leave a trail of energetic particles that astronomers are able to detect using radio telescopes. Usually the radio emissions from these particles fade away and become invisible.
10 years of LOFAR highlights: Infographic – The evolution of LOFAR supercomputers
This infographic shows the ‘evolution’ of supercomputers used for LOFAR.
10 years of LOFAR highlights: The LOFAR Transient Buffer Board
The LOFAR Transient Buffer Board (TBB) gave the LOFAR radio telescope a unique extra capability: looking back in time.
10 years of LOFAR highlights:The use of a monitor & control system that monitors a physically widely distributed instrument
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.
10 years of LOFAR highlights: LOFAR pioneers new way to study exoplanet environments
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.
10 years of LOFAR highlights: The TBB boards that act as a time machine
The LOFAR Transient Buffer Board (TBB) gave the LOFAR radio telescope a unique extra capability: looking back in time.
10 years of LOFAR highlights: Revisiting the Fanaroff-Riley dichotomy and radio-galaxy morphology with the LOFAR Two-Metre Sky Survey
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.
10 years of LOFAR highlights: Pulsar shows sudden mood swings
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.
10 years of LOFAR highlights: Super-slow pulsar challenges theory
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).
10 years of LOFAR highlights: The construction and use of our own broadband optical data transport system
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.
10 years of LOFAR highlights: Infographic – Interference detection and Dysco
This infographic explains how LOFAR treats data collected by its stations.
10 years of LOFAR highlights: RSP boards make sure beamforming is possible
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.