News & Events

News

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Please find the LOFAR2.0 newsletters here: https://www.astron.nl/lofar2-0-newsletter/

LOFAR Newsletter Oct 2021 – Mar 2022

Events

Mon 15 May 2023 - Wed 17 May 2023

Nederlandse Astronomen Conferentie 2023

The 78th Dutch Astronomers' Conference (“Nederlandse Astronomenconferentie”) will be organized by ASTRON the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy under the auspices of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Astronomenclub/Royal Netherlands Astronomical Society (KNA/RNAS).

April 2023

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Daily image

ERC Advanced Grant for Jason Hessels - EuroFlash: exploring the origins of fast radio bursts using a network of European radio telescopes

© Futselaar / Hessels / ASTRON

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) present astronomers with a compelling mystery: what is creating these brilliant but ephemeral flashes that travel billions of lightyears before reaching Earth? Whatever is producing the FRBs, it requires an extreme energy density and the conditions for `laser-like’ coherent radio emission to be generated. While recent discoveries show that magnetars are a leading contender, the heterogeneous properties of the known FRB sample strongly suggest that there are multiple FRB source types. If so, then we have multiple mysterious FRB origins to uncover.

Due to the great interest in solving this puzzle, enormous progress has been made in recent years. There are now hundreds of known FRB sources, dozens of which repeat, and some of which have been localised to their exact galactic neighbourhoods. The FRB sample continues to grow at a rapid pace of several new sources per day, thanks to new wide-field radio telescopes. Studying these sources with dedicated follow-up is challenging because they emit sporadically and are only visible for milliseconds or less. At the same time, by casting an even wider net we are likely to discover new types of FRB-like signals.

With EuroFlash, a recently awarded ERC Advanced grant, I will create a coordinated network of European radio telescopes operating over a broad range of radio frequencies, providing high sensitivity and observing cadence, and achieving the best-possible localisations. I will use this network to perform a world-leading, systematic study of repeating FRBs, to understand their progenitor(s) and their relation to the apparently one-off FRB sources. I will also make a novel exploration of the parameter space of short-duration radio transients by exploiting the large field-of-view of LOFAR2.0 and commensal observations to find new sources. In doing so, I aim to discover new types of astrophysical phenomena that probe the extremes of the Universe.

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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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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