ASTRON logo
SCIENCE

News & Events

News

LOFAR Newsletter
Published by the editorial team, 25 February 2026
LOFAR Newsletter February 2026
READ MORE
LOFAR Newsletter
Published by the editorial team, 29 October 2025
LOFAR Newsletter October 2025
READ MORE
LOFAR Newsletter
Published by the editorial team, 7 March 2025
LOFAR Newsletter March 2025
READ MORE
LOFAR Newsletter
Published by the editorial team, 15 November 2024
LOFAR Newsletter November 2024
READ MORE
LOFAR Newsletter
Published by the editorial team, 26 August 2024
LOFAR Newsletter August 2024
READ MORE
LOFAR Newsletter
Published by the editorial team, 17 May 2024
LOFAR Newsletter May 2024
READ MORE

Events

[MEC id="167"]

Daily image

NAC 2026 3rd poster prize for Dirk Kuiper, Sylvain Ranguin & Lars Zwaan

© ASTRON

One of the traditions at the annual Nederlandse Astronomen Conferentie (NAC; Netherlands Astronomy Conference) is the poster competition. This year, University of Amsterdam & ASTRON PhD candidates Dirk Kuiper, Sylvain Ranguin and Lars Zwaan won 3rd prize for their combined poster "EuroFlash: A 24/7 commensal search machine for (not-so) fast radio transients". The prize committee emphasised both the scientific quality of the work and the creative approach of combining three poster submissions in one mega-poster, which underlines the importance of collaboration and teamwork in science.

Dirk, Sylvain, and Lars are advised by Cees Bassa, Jason Hessels, Ziggy Pleunis, and Antonia Rowlinson at UvA/ASTRON, and they're working closely with ASTRON postdocs Reshma Anna-Thomas and Inés Pastor-Marazuela on LOFAR transient searches. With the new EuroFlash system on LOFAR2.0 we will be able to perform these searches in real-time, which enables rapid multi-wavelength follow-up to understand the astrophysics of newly discovered sources.

Colloquia

May 1, 2022

The Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST Survey (CRAFTS)

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) has released its first call for proposal and will be open to the international community next year. Based on a novel technique of high-cadence CAL injection, we have realized the world's first calibrated commensal survey mode, simultaneously taking data for pulsar search, HI galaxies, HI imaging, and FRBs. I introduce here one of the major survey plans, namely, the Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST Survey (CRAFTS, Li et al. 2018), which has discovered more than 100 new pulsars, including a few dozen MSPs, 5 new FRBs, including one new repeater. I will also briefly describe recent FAST results from CRAFTS and other dedicated programs, including new insights into the characteristic energy of FRBs, the formation process of neutron stars, the evolution of interstellar medium, etc.
Speaker
Institute
Host
May 14, 2022

Extreme UV Emission: Bridging Galaxy Evolution Across Cosmic Time

In the last few years, our first glimpse of the spectral properties of z∼5−7 galaxies has emerged. Deep UV spectra have revealed prominent high-ionization nebular emission lines (i.e., C IV, He II, C III]) indicating that extreme radiation fields may be characteristic of reionization-era systems. While such strong high-ionization emission lines are atypical of the well-studied z∼0−3 galaxy samples, our recent UV spectral campaigns have revealed several galaxies with analogous emission-line features to reionization-era systems. I will discuss the recent detection of extremely strong UV emission in nearby galaxies and the potential sources of their very hard ionizing radiation fields. Such strong detections of high-ionization emission lines have been linked to the leakage of Lyman continuum (LyC) photons (necessary for reionization) both theoretically and observationally. These extreme UV emission-line dwarf galaxies provide a template for the extreme conditions that are important for reionization, however their features are still poorly understood. In preparation for the coming UV window onto the early universe with the advent of ELTs and JWST, I will introduce the COS Legacy Archival Spectroscopic SurveY - an upcoming large HST program designed to disentangle the stellar and nebular spectral signatures of 45 star-forming galaxies. This program will calibrate new UV diagnostics that will allow us to trace galaxy evolution to the distant universe, unveiling the properties of reionization-era galaxies.
Speaker
Institute
Host
NEWSLETTER

Subscribe to the LOFAR newsletter:

Subscribe

For previous editions, click here.

To view the current and previous editions of the LOFAR2.0 newsletter, click here.

@astron

SDC Helpdesk