© ESO / Callingham et al.
The Nature blog detailing the discovery of the system is detailed available here: https://goo.gl/fuX9Sg
Public relations details about the system can be found here: https://www.astron.nl/cosmic-serpent-reveals-new-way-massive-stars-die and https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1838/
© Roberto Pizzo
This book was inspired by the excellent standard reference 'Synthesis Imaging in Radio Astronomy II' (1999), by Taylor, Carilli and Perley eds. With the LOFAR volume, our ambition was to provide additional information that is specifically needed to supplement the education of young radio astronomers working at low frequencies, and especially with LOFAR.
This book required important efforts from all the authors and was a long time in the making. Many aspects of the rapidly evolving LOFAR system have matured in the meantime. While these are obviously tracked regularly on the LOFAR webpages, we consider this book an important reference documentation of the LOFAR system and invite users to make it part of their collection.
The editors wish to thanks the organisers of the School, the lecturers and evening speakers, and the tutorial session leaders. A special thank-you goes to School participants, who have worked very hard to generate the images on the cover of the book and who have inspired the lecturers and tutors to do their best in helping you navigate the world of LOFAR. Finally, we wish to thank the authors of the chapters included in this book, not only for contributing their material, but also for their patience as the entirety of the volume came together.
The book can be downloaded at https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319234335
© M. Moscibrodzka
© C. Bassa
When being in such a spot light, many will be asked the question one is only allowed to ask someone on their birthday about age. Some circumvent the issue of having to answer this by writing down riddles for their colleagues to solve.
ASTRON's one and only Marcel Loose put the bar for creativitiy and sense of mathematics high, by putting down the riddle in the photo. Can you make up how old he is now?
(the riddle actually has two answers of which, by coincidence, the other is the age of the author).
© N/A
© OzGrav, Swinburne University of Technology.
The image shows an artist's impression of fast radio bursts in the sky above CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope. Fast radio bursts come from all over the sky and last for just milliseconds. ASKAP is located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, the future site in Australia for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
© N/A
© Colloquium
© Henk Mulder
Everyday the observers make sure they get home safely and that their hard work is translated into more elements of the field turned on in the observation.
On the picture we see Tonjes Tipping, every year around April he goes into the field to assist the maintenance team, and in November he leaves us again to return the next year.
But even now while we are sitting in our warm offices, when the days get shorter and colder, there are people in the field making sure LOFAR stays functioning to the best of it's capabilities.
Thank you brave souls!
© McClure-Griffiths et al. (2018)
More details can be found in the recently published paper: McClure-Griffiths et al. 2018, Nature Astronomy
ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.01772
© Sjoerd van der Hucht
Seeking collaborations with other disciplines is actively stimulated by NWO-I. For us the advantage is that we can gain knowledge about the way other applications deal with their big data challenges. Additionally working in collaborations can unleash other sources of funding for the research and development projects we would like to pursue for the next generation radio telescopes.
The photo shows me, giving a spontaneous pitch about our trustworthy digital systems during the event.
© JvL
On 23 Oct 2018 the exciting day arrived that Klim got to defend his thesis, in the ceremonial setting of the Agnietenkapel on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal. The opposition was started by our esteemed colleague Prof. dr. Fronefield Crawford III from Franklin & Marshall College and continued over a wide range of questioning. Klim withstood these, and was awarded the title. In the pictures series on the bottom row, a progression from tense to cheerful is clearly visible from left to right.
Anyone interested in a hard copy of the thesis is welcome to pick one up in Joeri's office.
© Á. Sanchez-Monge
In the last years, we have pursued a large project to characterize the structure of SgrB2 combining observations at different wavelengths and sensitive to all the scales (ranging from the large envelope that extends about 40 pc down to a few hundred AU), with 3D radiative transfer modelling. Some of the main results reveal (i) distributed (high-mass) star formation happening throughout the whole SgrB2 envelope and not only in the central hot molecular cores, (ii) extended HII regions, mixed with non-thermal radiation, likely shaping the structure of the envelope, (iii) clusters of hot molecular cores with a myriad of lines and different chemical and physical properties, and (iv) a converging filamentary structure that transports mass from the outside to the center of the most massive cores. These results and others will be presented in the talk.
© JP
The weather is very beautiful, but the Lofar outdoor maintenance season has come to an end.
Together with Tonjes Jipping they will have to look for a winter-period job.
We may hope that the three of them are available again, at the start of the maintenance season of 2019, for they are doing excellent work.
© CC BY 4.0
These images show the 3C 196 field in Stokes Q polarization as observed with LOFAR. From previous LOFAR observations it was discovered that the 3C 196 field, which is one of the fields targetted by the LOFAR Epoch of Reionization project, has intriguing linear polarized structures in the EoR field that as of yet are not well understood (see Jelić et al. 2015 and daily image 20151110). For testing IDG, a single subband of a 3C 196 observation was imaged and corrected for LOFAR's beam response.
Both the left and right image were cleaned as deep as possible using WSClean's auto-masking cleaning strategy, with one important difference: IDG was used to produce the right image to correct for the beam, leading to a dramatic improvement of image quality. The left image shows strong artefacts from sources that are not polarized, but end up in the image because the instrumental leakage of LOFAR is not corrected for. In the IDG image, sources that are not polarized are 'cleaned' from the image, and the real polarized structure is much more clearly visible. This process is fully automated.
IDG was developed by Bas van der Tol, Bram Veenboer, Tammo Jan Dijkema and André Offringa, with the help of several scientists that have tested the imager, and was recently published in A&A (Van der Tol, Veenboer & Offringa 2018) and IEEE (Veenboer, Petschow & Romein 2017).
© ASTRON
Ruud was also the one who took care of the development and effort necessary to start a real-time observation at Exloo, during the LOFAR opening by our Queen Beatrix at the 12th of June in 2010. Not known by many and finally revealed to the public the famous push on the golden button by the Queen led to the important action of Ruud to press "Enter" on his computer in order to start a live observation.
Ruud requested to celebrate his goodbye low-profile and non-standard. He is a person who thinks different and preferred to give treats by himself during the coffee break today.
We like to thank Ruud for all his efforts and being our colleague for such a long time. We wish you all the best and good luck in your new and interesting job.
© ASTRON
The tour ended with an informal Q&A session, while enjoying some drinks and snacks. The ASTRON staff involved got a very nice present from Lankhorst, to enjoy during the upcoming dark months...
The Lankhorst staff was especially impressed by the enthusiasm and joy that the ASTRON staff showed during the tour. Clearly, we are very proud of the work we do at ASTRON.
© ASTRON
Ruud was also the one who took care of the development and effort necessary to start a real-time observation at Exloo, during the LOFAR opening by our Queen Beatrix at the 12th of June in 2010. Not known by many and finally revealed to the public the famous push on the golden button by the Queen led to the important action of Ruud to press "Enter" on his computer in order to start a live observation.
Ruud requested to celebrate his goodbye low-profile and non-standard. He is a person who thinks different and preferred to give treats by himself during the coffee break today.
We like to thank Ruud for all his efforts and being our colleague for such a long time. We wish you all the best and good luck in your new and interesting job.
© Pratika Dayal
© ASTRON PR
The amounts of data that researchers need to process are steadily increasing. The infrastructure needed to support the storage, movement, and accessibility of this data needs to be optimised for high-speed transfers. However, the focus in general-purpose architectures lies more on supporting business operations, and less on ensuring data mobility and security policies that allow for high data transfer performance and plenty of storage.
The goal of the workshop was to discuss infrastructure topics relating to those problems. In total 35 people (including locals) visited ASTRON, making the workshop a great success.
