LOFAR ERIC has been officially set up by the European Commission on 20 December 2023.
LOFAR ERIC will soon be taking on all governance and operations responsibilities for the LOFAR Distributed Research Infrastructure. This website will be updated accordingly in due time.
LOFAR forms the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope and operates at the lowest radio frequencies that can be observed from Earth. Unlike classical dish telescopes, LOFAR is a multipurpose sensor network, with an innovative computer and network infrastructure that can handle extremely large data volumes. Its long-term archive already contains over 40 petabytes of astronomical data.
With its wide and flexible range of capabilities, LOFAR is having an important impact on a
broad range of astrophysics, from cosmology to Solar system studies. Much of LOFAR's highest-impact science is being carried out through ‘Key Science Projects’ (KSPs),
composed of broad teams of researchers from several European countries. Key Science
Projects include:
LOFAR, inaugurated in 2010, is an innovative radio telescope operating between 10 and 240 MHz, consisting of an array of many thousands of antennas distributed in fields (stations) across Europe. LOFAR does not have moving parts; steering and tracking are achieved by treating the signal from the individual antennas in each station with advanced digital beam-forming techniques that make the system agile, allowing for rapid repointing of the telescope as well as giving the potential for multiple simultaneous observations.
As of early 2021, there are 52 LOFAR stations, located in 8 countries in Europe. LOFAR has a dense core in the north of the Netherlands, close to Exloo, with 6 stations located within a 320 m-diameter island known as the Superterp, and a further 18 stations within a 2 km radius. The Superterp stations can be phased-up into a single station for increased sensitivity. Beyond the core, there are a further 14 ‘remote’ stations within the Netherlands, extending out to baselines of 90 km. LOFAR then has a further 14 international stations reaching out to over 1000km from the core. This combination of a dense core and long interferometric baselines spanning Europe allows LOFAR to achieve unparalleled sensitivity and angular resolution (approaching that of the Hubble Space Telescope at optical wavelengths) in the low-frequency radio regime.
Each LOFAR station has two separate antenna arrays: the low-band antennas (LBA)
operating below 80 MHz, and the high-band antennas (HBA) operating above 110 MHz (the FM radio band prohibits observations between ~80 and 110 MHz). The signal from the antennas is streamed to a central processing facility based in Groningen (the Netherlands). The data rate is up to 3 Gb/sec per station for the current LOFAR array, and so a dedicated wide-area network connects the Dutch LOFAR stations, and dedicated international links are used to transport the data from international stations.
The first stage of the central processing handles the real-time data operations, such as the correlation of the data streams. The correlated data is then streamed to an offline Central Processing facility, on which application-dependent offline processes are run on the data (e.g. for standard imaging, these include some or all of: flagging of corrupted data; averaging; calibration; self-calibration; image creation). The data are then transported to the Long-Term Archive (LTA), where they are stored for further distribution to the scientific community. As of early 2021, there are three LTA data centres, located in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Jülich (Germany), and Poznan (Poland).
The LOFAR ERIC Council has appointed Dr. Michiel van Haarlem as the new Executive Director of the European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), established by the European Commission in December 2023.
On December 20, 2023 the European Union officially established the LOFAR ERIC: a European Research Consortium Infrastructure. The activities of the Dutch International LOFAR Telescope (ILT) foundation are now continued by the European LOFAR ERIC.
To celebrate this milestone, delegates of all ten participating countries came to the Netherlands, the hosting country of the LOFAR ERIC and location of the LOFAR core.
The LOFAR Family meeting 2024 will take place from 3 - 7 June 2024 in Leiden. It is hosted by Leiden Observatory, the astronomical institute of Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Established in 1633 to house the quadrant of Rudolph Snellius, it is the oldest operating university observatory in the world.
The Low Frequency Array European Research Infrastructure Consortium (LOFAR ERIC) is looking for a new executive director, who will play a pivotal role in representing LOFAR ERIC to all relevant stakeholders and ensure the efficient joint operation of the LOFAR facilities.
We write to follow the announcement you have received from René Vermeulen describing his imminent extended leave, starting on 1 March.
We take this first opportunity to extend our heartfelt thanks and appreciation for René in leading LOFAR to its current heights. René’s painstaking work has enabled LOFAR to build from a nascent Dutch facility into an ever-growing and strong European collaboration of members, now numbering 10 countries.
LOFAR ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) has been officially launched at its first Council meeting today. The world-leading LOFAR (LOw Frequency ARray) Distributed Research Infrastructure has already revolutionised low-frequency radio astronomy research, resulting in an avalanche of scientific publications in the past decade. LOFAR ERIC is now a single legal entity across the European Union.