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The UK antennas for the world's largest telescope have been installed.

Friday 11 June 2010

The LOFAR-UK project is funded by a consortium of UK Universities and supported by a team of STFC staff.  These  include Derek McKay from SSTD (part funded by the South Eastern Physics Network (SEPNet)) who was responsible for organising and carrying out the work of building of the telescope at Chilbolton,  Mike Willis (SSTD) who was the local project manager and Gordon Brown of STFC e-Science who , as the LOFAR LBA Installation Manager, was responsible for the planning and pre-build logistics. Volunteers came from members of the LOFAR-UK consortium of more than twenty UK scientific/academic institutions, who are working together to site antenna stations in the UK and transport the data for correlation in the Netherlands via high-speed internet.

The new international LOFAR radio-telescope is the largest radio telescope in the world which has been built according to a completely new concept. No large dishes are used, but large numbers of small, low-cost antennas. 7,000 antennas are spread over 44 fields in the North of the Netherlands and from Sweden to France and from the UK to the East of Germany. The observations of an object that are made simultaneously by the many LOFAR antennas across Europe are brought together at the University of Groningen's Computer Centre where they are combined together using very long baseline interferometry to emulate a telescope with a size equal to the maximum separation between the telescope stations. In this way, a giant telescope is formed with a diameter of 1500 kilometers. The larger the diameter of the telescope the greater the its ability to resolve low energy sources. As the largest radio telescope, LOFAR should be able to detect more remote objects than previously seen.

Different telescopes operate at different frequencies along the electromagnetic spectrum from Gamma rays through x-rays, optical light, infra-red, terahertz radiation, and radio waves down to low frequency radio waves. LOFAR operates at the extreme bottom end of this spectrum below the frequency range of the seven radio telescopes which combine together in e-Merlin which operates from 151 MhZ up to 25 GHz over a maximum baseline of 217 km. LOFAR has two distinct antenna types: the Low Band Antennas (LBA) operate between 10 and 90 MHz and the High Band Antennas (HBA) between 110 and 250 MHz. In general, the lower the frequency, the lower the energy and the further away, or the older, the objects to be viewed. Since these low frequency radio waves are of such low energy, a large baseline telescope, such as LOFAR, is required to resolve any signals.

The telescope will research, among other things, the earliest Universe, cosmic particles and magnetism in the Milky Way and other galaxies. Professor Bob Nichol, of the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: "The LOFAR telescope will produce an enormous volume of data which will enable a significant amount of science, from monitoring the sun's activity or 'space weather' to potentially searching for alien intelligence."

LOFAR is also used for research in the area of geophysics and ICT. The solution to the ICT challenges of coordinating and correlating the 750TB per week of data from the different stations across Europe will be a stepping stone to the next major astronomy facility - the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) which is planned to be fully operational by 2024.

Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands will officially open the LOFAR telescope, on Saturday afternoon 12 June 2010 in Borger-Odoorn (Drenthe). Professor Rob Fender of the University of Southampton, as leader of LOFAR UK, will sign the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT) Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on behalf of the UK. The UK station is planned to be fully operational as part of the international LOFAR telescope by September 2010.