* Astronomy

New radio telescope will listen to the Universe on the FM-band

The first major radio telescope to be built in Britain for many decades will 'listen' to the sky at FM frequencies, providing vast quantities of data to a supercomputer in Holland, paving the way for unexpected new discoveries.
Astronomers, including scientists at the University of Southampton, hope to detect when the first stars were formed and will observe some of the most distant galaxies, revealing more about how the Universe evolved.
The telescope is being constructed this week (June 7-11) by a band of university volunteers in a field at the Chilbolton Observatory, near Andover in Hampshire, which is part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
Students, lecturers and researchers mainly from the universities of Southampton, Portsmouth and Oxford are helping scientists at Chilbolton to install 96 radio antennae, which are part of the European LOFAR project (Low Frequency Array). When completed, LOFAR will consist of over 5,000 separate antennae spread in 'stations' all over Europe. Stations have already been completed in the Netherlands and Germany and others are planned in France, Sweden and Poland.
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LOFAR opens up the low-frequency universe - and starts a new SETI search

The Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a new pan-European radio astronomy facility, has started mapping the Universe at very low energy wavelengths, a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is relatively unexplored. It will detect faint signals from the first stars and mini-black holes that emerged when the Universe was only 500 000 years old - and will also be looking for signs of other civilisations in the Universe closer to home. Dr John McKean will present the first images at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) 2010 in Glasgow on Tuesday 13th April.
Astronomers plan to use LOFAR to study the many cosmic rays that impact the Earth every day, pulsars and the magnetic field within our own and nearby galaxies. LOFAR will also compile a census of billions of radio emitting galaxies from the very early Universe, helping us to understand how galaxies formed and evolved over cosmic time.

Source RAS

Astronomers are finding millisecond pulsars faster than ever

ASTRON astronomers are part of an international team that is discovering the exotic stars known as "millisecond pulsars" at an astonishing rate. Whereas in the last 30 years only 60 millisecond pulsars have been identified in the disk of our Galaxy, 17 new millisecond pulsars have been found in just the last 3 months by using large radio telescopes to target sources of high-energy gamma-rays recently found with NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. This sudden jump in the known population of these rare stars offers the opportunity to better understand their formation and evolution, and increases the chances of using an ensemble of millisecond pulsars as the lever arms of an immense gravitational wave detector. These discoveries were announced January 5th, 2010 in Washington, DC at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
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LOFAR observes across borders
An international group of astronomers have succeeded in the first joint observations between the LOFAR stations in Exloo (The Netherlands) and Effelsberg (Germany). This constitutes the "first light" of the LOFAR telescope as an international array. The bright quasar 3C 196, located almost ten billion light years away from Earth, was detected successfully on 2009 August 20 providing first "interferometric fringes", equivalent to the "first light" for an ordinary telescope.
Olaf Wucknitz, astronomer at the Argelander-Institut für Astronomy of the University of Bonn, found conclusive proof of the detection on 2009 August 31, after initial analysis of the data by astronomers from ASTRON (Dwingeloo, NL), the University of Manchester (UK), and the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie (MPIfR; Bonn, DE).

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