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'LOFAR' is the 'LOw Frequency ARray' for radio astronomy. It is an ambitious project to build an interferometric array of radio telescopes distributed across the Netherlands and Northern Germany, with a total effective collecting area of up to 1 square kilometre. The processing of the data is done by a Blue Gene/L supercomputer situated at the University of Groningen.

'LOFAR' started as a new and innovative effort to force a breakthrough in sensitivity for astronomical observations at radio-frequencies below 250 MHz. Astronomical radio interferometers usually consist either of arrays of parabolic dishes (e.g. the One-Mile Telescope), arrays of one-dimensional antennas (e.g. the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope) or two-dimensional arrays of omni-directional dipoles (e.g. Tony Hewish's Pulsar Array). LOFAR combines aspects of many of these earlier telescopes — in particular it uses omni-directional dipole antennas as a phased array using the aperture synthesis technique developed in the 1950s. Like the earlier CLFST low-frequency radio telescope, the design of LOFAR has concentrated on the use of large numbers of relatively cheap antennas, with the mapping performed using aperture synthesis software.
The electronic signals from the LOFAR antennas are digitised, transported to a central digital processor, and combined in software in order to map the sky. The cost is dominated by the cost of electronics and will follow Moore's law, becoming cheaper with time and allowing increasingly large telescopes to be built. So LOFAR is an IT-telescope. The antennas are simple enough but there are a lot of them — 25000 in the full LOFAR design. To make radio pictures of the sky with adequate sharpness, these antennas are to be arranged in clusters that are spread out over an area of ultimately 350 km in diameter. The currently funded first phase contains 15000 antennas, reaching baselines of 100 km. Data transport requirements are in the range of many terabit/s and the processing power needed is tens of teraFLOPS.
The mission of LOFAR is to survey the universe at radio frequencies from ~10–240 MHz with greater resolution and greater sensitivity than previous surveys, such as the 7C and 8C surveys, and surveys by the Very Large Array (VLA) and Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT).
LOFAR will be the most sensitive radio observatory until the next generation of large array radio telescope, the 'Square Kilometre Array' (SKA), comes online around 2020.

Contents

Science case

Key projects

The Epoch of Reionisation

Deep Extragalactic Surveys

Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays

Timeline

External links

References

Science case

The sensitivities and spatial resolutions attainable with LOFAR will make possible several fundamental new studies of the Universe as well as facilitating unique practical investigations of the environment of the Earth.

★ In 'the very distant Universe' (), LOFAR can search for the signature produced by the reionization of neutral hydrogen. This crucial phase change is predicted to occur at the epoch the formation of the first stars and galaxies, marking the end of the so-called "dark ages". The redshift at which reionization is believed to occur will shift the 1420 MHz line of neutral hydrogen into the LOFAR observing window.

★ In 'the distant “formative” Universe' (), LOFAR will detect the most distant massive galaxies and will study the processes by which the earliest structures in the Universe (galaxies, clusters and active nuclei) form and probe the intergalactic gas.

★ In 'the nearby Universe', LOFAR will map the 3-dimensional distribution of cosmic rays and global magnetic field in our own and nearby galaxies.

★ The 'High Energy Universe', LOFAR will detect the ultra high energy cosmic rays as they pierce the Earth’s atmosphere. A dedicated test station for this purpose, LOPES, has been in operation since 2003.

★ Within 'our own galaxy', LOFAR will detect flashes of low-frequency radiation from pulsars and short-lived transient events produced by stellar merging and interactions and will search for Jupiter-like extrasolar planets.

★ Within 'our solar system', LOFAR will detect coronal mass ejections from the Sun and provide continuous large-scale maps of the solar wind. This crucial information about solar weather and its effect on the Earth will facilitate predictions of costly and damaging geomagnetic storms.

★ Within 'the Earth’s immediate environment', LOFAR will map irregularities in the ionosphere continuously, detect the ionizing effects of distant gamma ray bursts and the flashes predicted to arise from the highest energy cosmic rays, the origins of which are unclear.

★ By exploring a new spectral window LOFAR is likely to make unexpected '"serendipitous" discoveries'. Detection of new classes of objects and/or new astrophysical phenomena have resulted from almost all previous facilities that open new regions of the spectrum, or pushed instrumental parameters, such as sensitivity by more than an order of magnitude.
Much LOFAR science builds on fundamental areas of research that have been pursued intensively or pioneered within the Netherlands during the last half century.

Key projects

★ Transient Sources

★ Pulsars

The Epoch of Reionisation

One of the most exciting applications of LOFAR will be the search for redshifted 21 cm line emission from the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR). It is currently believed that the Dark Ages, the period after recombination when the Universe turned neutral, lasted until around z=20. WMAP polarization results appear to suggest that there may have been extended, or even multiple phases of Reionisation, the start possibly being around z~15-20 and ending at z~6. Using LOFAR the redshift range from z=11.4 (115 MHz) to z=6 (180 MHz) can be probed.

Deep Extragalactic Surveys

One of the most important applications of LOFAR will be to carry out large-sky surveys. Such surveys are well suited to the characteristics of LOFAR and have been designated as one of the key projects that have driven LOFAR since its inception. Such deep LOFAR surveys of the accessible sky at several frequencies will provide unique catalogues of radio sources for investigating several fundamental areas of astrophysics, including the formation of massive black holes, galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Because the LOFAR surveys will probe unexplored parameter space, it is likely that they will discover new phenomena.

Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays

LOFAR offers a unique possibility in particle astrophysics for studying the origin of high-energy cosmic rays (HECRs) at energies between $10^\{15\}-10^\{20.5\}$ eV. Both the sites and processes for accelerating particles are unknown. Possible candidate sources of these HECRs are shocks in radio lobes of powerful radio galaxies, intergalactic shocks created during the epoch of galaxy formation, so-called Hyper-novae, Gamma-ray bursts, or decay products of super-massive particles from topological defects, left over from phase transitions in the early universe.
The primary observable is the intense radio pulse that is produced when a primary CR hits the atmosphere and produces an Extensive Air Shower (EAS). An EAS is aligned along the direction of motion of the primary particle, and a substantial part of its component consists of electron-positron pairs which emit radio emission in the terrestrial magnetosphere (e.g., geo-synchrotron emission).

Timeline

LOFAR was proposed to ASTRON in 1997. A feasibility study was carried out and international partners sought during 1999. In 2000 the Netherlands LOFAR Steering Committee was set up by the ASTRON Board with representatives from all interested Dutch university departments and ASTRON.
In November 2003 the Dutch Government allocated 52 million euro to fund the infrastructure of LOFAR under the Bsik programme. In accordance with Bsik guidelines, LOFAR was funded as a multidisciplinary sensor array that will facilitate research in geophysics, computer sciences and agriculture as well as astronomy.
In December 2003 LOFAR's Initial Test Station (ITS) became operational; this was an important milestone in the LOFAR development. The ITS system consists of 60 inverse V-shaped dipoles; each dipole is connected to a low-noise amplifier (LNA), which provides enough amplification of the incoming signals to transport them over a 110 m long coaxial cable to the receiver unit (RCU).

On April 26 2005, an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer was installed at the University of Groningen's math center, for LOFAR's data processing. At the time, this was the second most powerful supercomputer in Europe, after the MareNostrum in Barcelona[1].
In August/September 2006 the first LOFAR station (''Core Station 1'', aka. CS1 ) has been put in the field using pre-production hardware. A total of 96 dual-dipole antennas (the equivalent of a full LOFAR station) are grouped in 4 clusters, the central cluster with 48 dipoles and other three clusters with 16 dipoles each. Each cluster is about 100 m in size. The clusters are distributed over an area of ~500 m in diameter.

External links

★ LOFAR website

★ Results from test stations

★ Interactive map of possible station locations

References

★ LOFAR as a Probe of the Sources of Cosmological Reionisation. (preprint: astro-ph/0412080)

★ LOFAR, a new low frequency radio telescope. (preprint: astro-ph/0309537)

★ LOFAR: A new radio telescope for low frequency radio observations: Science and project status. (preprint: astro-ph/0307240)