LOFAR is one of Southampton University's 60 at 60 Achievements

The University of Southampton celebrates it's 60th birthday this year. As part of the celebrations for this, they have made a list of 60 world changing achievements, and LOFAR is number 21 on that list.

Celebrations for this event will include installations around the Southampton campus to celebrate the achievements (for details see here). LOFAR will be celebrated by the installation of an antenna outside the physics building. This antenna will have a QR code which people can use to learn more about the project. 

The University of Southampton will also hold a public open day on June 30th to celebrate. Tickets are not required for the public open day, but if you sign up in advance you can be entered into a competition to win an iPad. The Soton Astrodome will take part, running a specially designed 45 minute planetarium show about LOFAR every hour from 11am-4pm. This show is free to members of the public, but will have limited spaces. Sign up sheets will be available on the campus from 11am. 

LOFAR Related PhDs at Southampton University

There are two PhD positions are available to work on LOFAR related science at the University of Southampton. Below is the advert from Southampton. 


Cosmological Radio Transients: Novel Techniques and Optical Counterparts


- Prof Rob Fender (http://www.astro.soton.ac.uk/~rpf)

Two PhD positions are available to work in the newly-formed '4 PI SKY' team at Southampton, led by Professor Fender and funded by a 3 million Euro EC grant. The goal of the team is to coordinate and advance global efforts for the discovery, identification and understanding of cosmological radio bursts. These bursts are associated with diverse extreme astrophysical phenomena such as merging neutron stars, accreting black holes and supernovae. With these programs we hope to perform a real-time census of particle acceleration in the local universe, understand the growth of black holes on cosmological timescales, probe the nature of the distant intergalactic medium for the first time, and - just maybe - detect electromagnetic counterparts to the first-detected gravitational wave sources.

Professor Fender is joint project leader of radio transients programs on both LOFAR (www.lofar.org) and MeerKAT (www.ska.ac.za), two revolutionary new radio telescopes. The PhD projects available are (i) to work, in partnership with the Oxford University Transient Universe Studies group (OTUS), to develop novel techniques for the detection of transient events in the vast streams of data that will be produced by telescopes such as LOFAR and MeerKAT, and (ii) to work on the follow-up and classification programs for the optical counterparts of detected radio transients - only with these data will we be able to understand the physics behind the bursts that we detect.

Both of these projects will involve close collaboration with, and visits to, other collaborating groups in places such as Amsterdam, Cape Town and Sydney. The projects are funded for 4 years each and are open to applicants from across the EC. 


For more details on the group, and how to apply for the studentships,
please go to:

http://www.astro.soton.ac.uk/postgrad.html

Rob Fender and LOFAR in the Sunday Telegraph

An article on the LOFAR-UK lead scientist Prof. Rob Fender (Southampton Uni) and what he plans to do with LOFAR appeared in the Sunday Telegraph this weekend:
New telescopes peer back to birth of first stars

Building LOFAR-Sweden

While in the UK we've completed our LOFAR station and can retreat inside our homes when the icy weather comes, in Sweden, they have just started the construction of their station, at Onsala. The image below is a great snapshot taken today of the preparatory work underway amidst the snow and ice (credit John Conway).

Sweden will be the final one of the 'founding' members (NL, DE, France, UK, Sweden) of the International LOFAR Telescope to construct their station, and we expect full operation of the entire ~40-station array in 2011.

In the meantime, our station at Chilbolton has been taking some observations of the Sun, and should be connected to the Dutch supercomputer/correlator in the very near future, allowing the first high-resolution images utilising the British baseline. More posts coming soon !

Transformational Science from a Revolutionary Radio Telescope

Now available on YouTube is the talk "Transformational Science from a Revolutionary Radio Telescope" given by Prof. Rob Fender (Southampton Uni/LOFAR-UK Project Leader) at the LOFAR-UK Chilbolton Opening on Monday 20th September 2010.

Chilbolton crop circles

Completely unrelated to the real science we're doing at Chilbolton, but fun nonetheless...

I just found in doing some research on the Chilbolton site (most famous for being an airfield in the past, and of course for our LOFAR station in the future..) that in 2001 the site was famous nationally for some elaborate crop circles. In the picture below you can see crop 'circles' from August 2001. The lower pattern is a face, the upper one is a replica of the 'SETI' signal sent by the giant Arecibo radio dish towards the globular cluster M13 in 1974 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message for more information on this act of exploration and optimism). Now if these crop circles had appeared AFTER we completed the station, the press would have been *really* interested...

Inauguration`

I attended the LOFAR inauguration on Saturday. It was excellent - a spectacular show, slightly kitschy but with plenty of wine and, of course, Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands to formally open the telescope. My job at the ceremony was to sign the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT) Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on behalf of the UK as a founding member. It was quite formal !

Signing of the founding MoU
From left to right: Rene Vermeulen and Mike Garret [representing ASTRON], Ralph-Juergen Dettmar [Germany], Garrelt Mellema [Sweden], Michel Tagger [France], myself, and Ralph Wijers [Dutch Universities]

Fender et al.

As he has already posted about, Rob Fender (right), head of the LOFAR-UK project has been spending some time in Chilbolton this week. Rob even pitched in and helped get some aerials built. Thanks Rob! We look forward to hearing about your visit with Queen B in the Netherlands.

June 9

Up to the site again today, my last visit during LBA build week. The progress is amazing and barring some catastrophe or a dose of traditional british weather the construction should be easily wrapped up by tomorrow. Still lots more to do after that, of course, but its a major milestone. Lots of press at the site again today too !

Here's another selection of photos

1. Look at that for progress! More than 80 of the 96 done by the time I left

2. Thankfully bored first aider Elizabeth Nichol guarding the RFI cabinet for us.





Elizabeth is sitting there all week in case we need some first aid - another piece of sterling volunteer work - thanks !

The cabinet is where all the cables from the 96 LBAs and 96 HBA tiles all meet, the signal is processed and then starts on its journey to the BlueGene supercomputer in Groningen in The Netherlands (don't forget, this coming Saturday - June 12 - is the official inauguration of LOFAR by the Dutch Queen, Beatrix)




3. Wife and Husband (Judith Croston and Martin Hardcastle) in a race leading side-by-side LBA construction (they're the two in the blue hats, as team leaders).

Also note Harry Smith marching off to drill something else..

... and the 'old style' technology (i.e. the dish) in the background.




4. Sadie Jones (Southampton PhD student) gets interviewed by ITV Meridian.

The past few days have seen ITV, BBC (both Sky at Night and Horizon) as well as a whole host of radio shows, on the site and in other forms of contact (quite a few radio interviews).

Also lots of coverage in the national press, e.g.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/10273845.stm

and

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7810454/British-scientists-launch-major-radio-telescope.html

- Well done the outreach team for generating such interest.

That's it from me for this week, I'm up at 5am tomorrow to fly to The Netherlands to attend the inauguration and sign the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT) Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) as representative of the UK. Should be fun.. now what to say to Queen B?

June 8

Today I visited the site for ~4 hr, took lots of photos, spoke to Sky at Night and even helped to build a couple or three LBAs. Very exciting to see both the progress and the fantastic team spirit - thanks to all who are helping ! Here's some photos...

1. Some of the troops at least know how to respond in the presence of an officer ;-)






2. A team in action - fixing the guys to the corner stakes so the post, at the top of which is the amplifier, is secure and correctly oriented. Amazing that these relatively simple bits of wire can pick up signals from 10 billion years ago..











3. Lunch for the army ! well earned.













4. Progress ! great work - thanks all :-)














5. The site from the lunch camp.. time to leave,
back tomorrow

Heroes of the trenches

Last week I visited the Chilbolton site to see the outstanding progress for myself. The site really is transformed, and it is now quite possible to believe that only two months from now we will have a fully constructed LOFAR station.

Many people are contributing enormously to this effort, and yet to many of you their names remain unknown. These heroes of the trenches (and the telecons, progress reports project plans, press releases..) are the people who are allowing us to build this station on a very tight budget in very lean times. One such hero, pictured here stepping through the trenches with his eyes closed, is Derek McKay. Derek is a senior STFC scientist, with a strong background in radio astronomy, who is being seconded by SEPNET to - amongst other things - commission the station. His efforts to date have been outstanding - many thanks Derek!

STFC support for LOFAR-UK

Following extensive discussions with STFC and the UK SKA R&D teams, a package has been formulated which guarantees the future of the LOFAR-UK station at Chilbolton, supplementing the resources already raised by LOFAR-UK. Additional support for installation, commissioning and operations of the station will now be provided from within the funding provision that was made for the UK SKA R&D programme, while maintaining the independence of LOFAR-UK. The program will now move ahead at full speed, facilitating full UK participation in LOFAR science during the first full array observations in 2010 and beyond.

Visit to Chilbolton, Sunday Nov 15

Last Sunday I dragged the family up to Chilbolton to see the first delivered parts, the marked out station location and test pits, all dug in preparation for construction early in the new year. After five years of UK effort, and a decade of personal LOFAR involvement (so far!) it was great to see the project getting to this stage. Owain Davies kindly opened up the site for us in the middle of his weekend.

On the left you can see a small Fender oblivious to the high technology which are the LBA ground planes in the background...





Owain also drove us around the station site in the STFC landrover, and pointed out to us how the test pits reveal the striking change from soil to chalk only 20 cm below the surface.

There are ideas about shaping this chalk layer to aid with drain-off of water from the site.

Anyway, although there are still major decisions to be taken about things like the mode and route of our data links to The Netherlands, this first step in the construction of the Chilbolton station is a very significant one for LOFAR-UK.