© ASTRON

At the end of 2013, POLFAR received a grant from the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education for the construction and equipment of three international LOFAR stations as part of their national research infrastructure investment. The new LOFAR stations will be located in Łazy (in southern Poland, operated by the Jagiellonian University in Krakow), Ba�dy (in northern Poland, operated by the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn), and Borowiec (in western Poland, operated by the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences). The formal agreement between the POLFAR consortium and ASTRON now marks the start of the preparations for the roll-out of these new stations.

Astronomical interests in Poland range from neutral hydrogen distribution in the early universe, to the timing of pulsars and studies of magnetic fields in various intergalactic, interstellar, planetary, and solar environments.

The International LOFAR Telescope has 38 stations in the Netherlands, six in Germany, and one each in France, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Connecting the three new POLFAR stations will add valuable extra sensitivity to the array. Moreover, the Polish stations provide new baselines of up to 1550 km in the array, making the ILT a much more capable instrument for high resolution imaging of detailed structures. Finally, the positions of the new stations literally provide new angles on ionospheric tomography.

The manufacturing of all components for the POLFAR stations, such as the thousands of antenna elements, and electronics, are to be contracted out to industry. The construction of the three new stations will start immediately and is estimated to be completed before the end of 2015.

The image shows the representatives of POLFAR and ASTRON at the LOFAR signing ceremony:

© JvL

On this doodle:

http://doodle.com/d6596pibvnv5amba

You can sign up and/or see who to get in touch with, to join.

If you need to plan you own trip, you can use the Cyclist Association's direction planner, that allows for scenic, direct bike-friendly planning that you can export to your GPS/phone:

http://en.routeplanner.fietsersbond.nl/

See you, all refreshed, tanned and healthy, at coffee or lunch on the 16th!

© ASTRON

Albertiene recently visited ASTRON as part of her introduction to her Board duties, and was given a tour of the building and our facilities - one of her personality traits is to be "interested in everything" - she certainly seemed impressed with the work going on in our labs and is clearly very much looking forward to her new role on the ASTRON Board.

In addition to Albertiene, the current ASTRON board now includes Prof. Karel Gaemers (chair), Sipke Swierstra (also chair of the LOFAR RvT), Prof. Johan Bleeker (former General Director of SRON), Prof. J. de Hosson (Professor of applied physics at the University of Groningen) and Prof. Josee van Eindhoven (Professor in Sustainable Management at the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, DRIFT, Erasmus University Rotterdam).

© astron

From 8-13 June, at Giardini Naxos near Mt. Etna in Sicily, more than 250 people (including many from Astron & Jive) attended a week-long meeting with many many talks and discussions. From the meeting it was clear that the science case of SKA is stronger than ever. In particular the variety, breadth and depth of science themes was impressive and it was good to see that Dwingeloo astronomers are involved in almost all of them. The meeting also made clear that community is very eager to start using SKA. We should really start building the bloody thing...

There were several non-scientific highlights at the meeting. One of these was, one evening while enjoying drinks on the beach, to see lava being spewed out by Mt. Etna. Another was, during the conference dinner, a huge SKA cake. Fitting for his role as 'Il SKA Padrino', Phil Diamond made sure everybody got his/her proper piece of the SKA cake (note the re-baseline cut�). Baciamo le mani.

© ASTRON

The picture was taken in late 2013, just after the newly refurbished dish of the 25m telescope was hoisted back into place. It has now started its second career as a national monument and outreach telescope.

Seen from above, the recent additions to the building complex stand out rather clearly by the color of the roof. They separate the somewhat less flamboyant R&D lab (left) and the Astronomy building (right), but also provide the bridges between them.

For more images, covering the last half century or so, just press the Archive button at the top of the page to browse the AJDI archive. You will be surprised.

© -

The destination was another spot on the Dwingelerveld, a nice place in the forest. There was an outdoor competition with the following elements: riding a unicycle, walking in the forest blindfolded, a timed balancing act, escaping from tied ropes and carrying balls up a hill. From this description and the pictures above it should be clear that it was the enthousiasm of everyone that made it, indeed, fun.

We were somewhat unlucky with the weather, which made that the planned barbecue took place in tents. And also that we couldn't bike the tandems back, because it was pouring. That's why we all tried to get in Eim's car, which of course got stuck in the mud. The last group activity was pushing Eim out, get the Astron cars, and get everyone back to Astron.

Thanks everyone for a nice day!

© Manel Perucho (Universitat de Valencia)

© Tammo Jan Dijkema, Bram Veenboer

Since the initial inhabitants of Pavillion West were not happy for some reason, it was decided to put the software people there. They thrived, of course, and rapidly developed a separate sub-culture, with soft furniture and picnic facilities. It can only be hoped that they will be equally productive now that they are back in the more formal surroundings of the building proper.

The pavillion was taken apart and removed in a remarkably short time, by a small number of people who had obviously done it before. A bit like rolling out new stations for the ever-expanding LOFAR telescope.

(*) Also fondly known as "Outhouse One".

(**) The other two were placed between the Astronomy building and the Guesthouse, and attached the South of Pavillion West.

© SKA-TSM

ASTRON is taking this ability to a higher level by investigating the possibilities of Moulded Interconnect Devices (3D-MID). This is a process that is widely used in the automotive and the cell phone industry, for mass-producing parts that integrate 3D plastic structures with 3D electronic circuits.

At this moment, the SKA-TSM team has succeeded in plating a complete plastic 3D-printed part with a conductive layer (bottom picture). This success can already be used for shielding purposes.

They have also succeeded in producing and 3D-printing conductive plastic. These two steps are the first towards locally metallizing plastic parts, and a step closer to prototyping 3D-MID parts.

© NSSC,CAS / NASA

© astropix.nl

NGC 5055 has been observed with the WSRT several times over the years. It is famous for its warped disk of neutral hydrogen which extend to well beyond the limits of this optical picture. The WSRT images of the neutral hydrogen disk of NGC 5055 even ended up in the book Galactic Dynamics by Binney and Tremaine, generally considered to be 'the Bible' on the topic.

The image above was made from Beilen on May 2nd 2014. The total integration time is 3 hours and 10 minutes, with a 400mm F/4.5 telescope and CCD camera.

At the height of our high-latitude summer, perpetual twilight is preventing more deep imaging. But starting from the end of July we will get some real darkness again at night.

© R. P. Deane et al.

role in the evolution of their hosts. How these giant black holes were formed

in the first place and how they grew with time is not clearly understood,

but galaxy mergers -that may have eventually led to the merging of their

central black holes- appear to be a natural explanation. If this is true,

then one expects to see a number of dual or even multiple supermassive

black hole systems in some galaxies. However, we only know of very few

examples so far, in particular at low separations. Very Long Baseline

Interferometry (VLBI) is a powerful tool to find and confirm close pairs

of supermassive black hole systems due to its great resolution.

Dr. Roger Deane et al. announced the discovery of a triple black hole system

in which the tight inner pair of black holes were resolved by the

European VLBI Network (EVN). The Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope

was part of the observations, and the data were correlated at the

Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe in Dwingeloo. These systems are important

for various reasons. In terms of galaxy evolution it is known that black holes

-especially in active galactic nuclei (AGN)- influence how galaxies evolve,

and understanding how often black holes themselves merge is key to this work.

Furthermore, closely orbiting systems such as this are sources of gravitational

waves in the Universe, if General Relativity is correct. Future radio telescopes

such as the SKA will be able to measure the gravitational waves from such

systems as their orbits decrease.

While the VLBI technique was essential to discover the inner two black holes

(which are in fact the second closest pair of supermassive black holes known),

Deane and co-authors have also shown that the binary black hole presence can be

revealed by much larger scale features. The orbital motion of the black hole is

imprinted onto its large jets, twisting them into a helical or corkscrew-like

shape. So even though black holes may be so close together that our telescopes

can’t tell them apart, their twisted jets may provide easy-to-find pointers to

them, much like using a flare to mark your location at sea. This may provide

sensitive future telescopes an additional way to find binary black holes with

much greater efficiency.

The image shows a sketch of the triple system with helical jets from one of the

supermassive black holes. The third black hole is part of the system, but farther

away and is likely to emit relatively straight jets. The inset shows the

EVN 1.7 GHz image (contours) overlaid on the EVN 5 GHz image (colour scale).

The results are published in Nature:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13454

See also the JIVE press release here:

http://www.jive.nl/trio-supermassive-black-holes-shake-space-time

© Madroon Community Consultants (MCC)

The picture shows the 4 contenders being interviewed by Maarten Huygen, a prominent journalist. In the end, the winner was Dr Bart Jansen (left, eclipsing the picture of Huygens), for his thesis The Power of Data Reduction: Kernels for Fundamental Graph Problems. The others were Dr Alexandra Silva (Kleene Coalgebra), Dr Jacopo Urbani (On Web-scale Reasoning). The inset shows Stefan flanked by his proud thesis supervisors, Prof Alle-Jan van der Veen (Delft) and Dr Jaap Bregman (ASTRON).

During the various speeches, ASTRON got quite a bit of glowing exposure, which was not lost on Dr Jet Bussemaker, the Minister of Education. Part of the praise came from Stefan himself, who emphasized that there are "at least 50" people at ASTRON with whom he can discuss his subject(s).

Apart from being promising young scientists, all 4 finalists were remarkably eloquent, saying sensible things about the best conditions for scientific success. And they were savvy enough not to be lured into commenting on national science policy. They will go far, just like their predecessors.

© Secretary ASTRON/JIVE

The guide showed a part of the Dwingelderveld that has recently been re-developed back to nature. This new nature, together with the fact that this is wet heathland again, has already attracted a lot of new species of both fauna and flora, and it is expected that others will follow.

After this nice stroll, which was only disrupted by some annoying mosquitos, we went to restaurant De Huiskamer for a lovely dinner on their wonderful terrace. The presentation of some of the dishes was quite amazing, as shown in one of the pictures.

© ASTRON, 2014

The PLL is a vital part of the Local Oscillator Generation system (LOG). With the LO-Generator Control Board, the Divider Unit and the Buffer Board (both coming soon to your AJDI) they form the LOG Subrack. Two of the LOGs are connected to the APERTIF Down Converter Units (DCU), (see also here). These systems mix down the antenna signals to the baseband so that the Analog-to-Digital Converter Unit (ADU) can convert it eventually to a digital data stream.

Design and production of the PLL unit is another good example for the outstanding collaboration between our mechanical and electronic department here at the ASTRON labs. Keeping phase drift between the different units under control was a big challenge, but fruitful discussions between mechanical- and radio engineers have led to a well performing system at reasonable cost. The slideshow depicts some aspects of mechanical design, control soft- and hardware development and the qualification in the climate chamber.

© (c) Astron 2014

Cobalt is the digital backend that replaced LOFAR's IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer (the big black thing on the right) at the 24th of April 2014. The 9-PC computer cluster -- 8 active servers and one spare, all sporting bright blue lights -- performs most calculations on NVIDIA K10 graphics processing units (GPUs).

About a year ago, we produced the first interferometric map of the Sun and Taurus A (top left) from a tiny amount of pre-recorded data, using off-line correlations. Now we can correlate 96 MHz of bandwidth from all 70 stations (antenna fields) that are currently part of the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT). What's more, we can do it in real time (top right), with capacity to spare!

The full core beamformer is almost as feature-complete as the BG/P beamformer was, and can detect faint millisecond pulsar signals in only a few minutes of data (bottom). Cobalt's main development effort has ended now, and it has become part of regular LOFAR operations, maintenance, and development. We look forward to many Petabytes of great quality data!

© ASTRON & IBM

ASTRON, IBM and three members of the Dome Users Platform are proud to host a Dome Premiere at ASTRON's Van de Hulst auditorium. Dome is the research project in which ASTRON and IBM have joined forces to create new technology for handling the huge amounts of data that will be generated by the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). After about two years of hard work, we are happy to share a memorable moment with you, introducing our newly developed, high-performance microserver.

Innovative microserver: small, powerful, and energy-efficient

The microserver we are showing today is a small, low-cost, low-power device, working like a full-fledged server. This technology will play an essential role in future datacenters and many other applications. This microserver redefines the term 'high-density': a 64-bit server CPU placed on a 133 x 55 mm board. It is not only very compact, it is also very energy-efficient. One of its innovations is optional hot-water cooling, which also supplies electrical power.

Programme 3 July 2014

13.30: Reception

14.00: Word of welcome by Albert-Jan Boonstra

14.05: �The Microserver and the Microserver Ecosystem� and �Microserver Application Areas� by Ronald Luijten, IBM Z�rich

14.50: �Making the difference in PCB design� by Ronald Otter, Strukton/Roneda��..

15.15: Break

15.35: �From Big Ideas to Micro-Engineering", by Tom Lamers, Transfer DSW

16.00: �Challenges in Future Microserver Designs�, by Hans Klos, Sintecs

16.25: Microserver developments, next steps, by Gert Kruithof, ASTRON

16.40: Exchanging knowledge and contact info over drinks

17.15: End of session

© Kevin Stovall

The GBNCC survey is carried out with the Robert C. Byrd telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. This is a huge 100m by 110m single dish that can be pointed anywhere in the sky. We are observing at 350 MHz, where pulsars are very bright and where the beam covers about a degree of sky. The goal is, between this and the similar Green Bank drift scan survey, to survey the entire sky visible from Green Bank. So far the GBNCC survey has carried out more than 48000 pointings (see image), with more being observed as this is being written. The drift scan survey found many pulsars, including several fascinating and exotic systems, and the GBNCC is finding many more.

The GBNCC is run by a worldwide group of astronomers, including ASTRON's own Jason Hessels, Vlad Kondratiev, and Anne Archibald. Follow-up of the discovered pulsars is being carried out with many telescopes, including Westerbork and LOFAR. LOFAR's multi-beaming capability makes the telescope unique in its ability to localize rotating radio transients.

© Astron

Clear evidence for this mechanism, in the form of detailed associations between the molecular gas kinematics and features in the radio-emitting jets, has however been lacking. In a paper which appeared in Nature today (led by Clive Tadhunter (Sheffield) and including Raffaella Morganti, Tom Oosterloo (ASTRON/Kapteyn Institute) and Raymond Oonk (ASTRON/Leiden)), the first unambiguous evidence that jets do indeed drive molecular outflows is presented.

Observations with the ISAAC spectrograph at the VLT show that the warm molecular hydrogen gas at the location of the western radio lobe of the Seyfert galaxy IC 5063 is moving at high velocities -up to about 600 kilometres per second- relative to the galaxy disk. The fact that the outflow exactly occurs at the location where the jet hits the interstellar medium, strongly suggests that the molecules have been accelerated by fast shocks driven into the interstellar medium by the expanding radio jets.

This result will inspire many further observations. In particular ALMA is very well suited to image in great detail the kinematics of molecular gas in galaxies and is a great instrument to use to further study the physics of jet driven gas outflows (stay tuned...).

The full title of the paper is: Jet acceleration of the fast molecular outflows in the Seyfert galaxy IC 5063, C. Tadhunter (Sheffield), R. Morganti (Astron/Groningen), M. Rose (CfA), J. B. R. Oonk (Astron/Leiden) & T. Oosterloo (Astron/Groningen) and is available on Astro-ph

© ASTRON

In order to create the right impression, graphic designer and illustrator Dannielle Futselaar ( http://artsource-danielle.blogspot.ch ) was asked to produce a striking front cover. It depicts the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT) - a distributed ICT instrument spanning 1000's of km via optical fibre links.

We are very happy with the result!