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LOFAR Newsletter
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Published by the editorial team, 2 November 2023
Retirement of Early LOFAR Cycle data (Cycle 0 to Cycle 6)
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Events

[MEC id="167"]

Daily image

EVN and GTC pinpoint a fast radio burst source to a satellite host galaxy

© Bhardwaj/Snelders

Using the European VLBI Network (EVN) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), we have found the first fast radio burst source where the host galaxy is a low-mass satellite of a more massive central galaxy - similar to the Small Magellanic Cloud and Milky Way. This study expands the known diversity of FRB host environments and offers important insights for interpreting seemingly "hostless" or highly offset FRBs.

The results are presented in a paper entitled "A Hyperactive FRB Pinpointed in an SMC-Like Satellite Host Galaxy", which will soon be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The figure above gives a wide-field red-green-blue (RGB) view of the FRB 20240114A field using DESI data. It shows the FRB host and EVN localisation ellipse as well as the central massive galaxy.

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.
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Institute
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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.
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