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Massive LOFAR data release details millions of objects
from Contact 10
BY ASTRON
Over a seven-year period, an international team of scientists has mapped over a quarter of the northern sky using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), revealing an astonishingly detailed radio image of more than 4.4 million objects and a very dynamic picture of our Universe. All of the data have recently been made public.
The vast majority of these objects are billions of light years away and are either galaxies that harbour massive black holes, or rapidly growing new stars. Rarer objects include colliding groups of distant galaxies and flaring stars within the Milky Way.
This data release, which is by far the largest from the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey (LoTSS), presents about a million objects that have never been seen before with any telescope, and almost four million objects that are new discoveries at radio wavelengths. The data can be used to search for a wide range of signals, such as those from nearby planets or galaxies right through to faint signatures in the distant Universe.
“This release is only 27% of the entire survey and we anticipate it will lead to many more scientific breakthroughs in the future, including examining how the largest structures in the Universe grow, how black holes form and evolve, the physics governing the formation of stars in distant galaxies and even detailing the most spectacular phases in the life of stars in our own Galaxy,” says astronomer Dr Timothy Shimwell, based at ASTRON and Leiden University.
The wealth of new information has already produced many scientific publications, such as the largest ever studies of colliding clusters of hundreds to thousands of galaxies offering new insights into magnetic fields and high energy particles in the Universe’s largest structures; finding curious signals from nearby stars that may be induced by orbiting exoplanets; pin-pointing the slowest-spinning pulsar that challenges the current theories describing such objects; observing so called“jellyfish galaxies”shedding material as they travel through the surrounding medium; witnessing eruptions of black holes that shape their local environment; probing the fabric of the cosmic web through the locations and shapes of galaxies; shedding new light on the most distant supermassive black holes in the Universe.
Read the full Astronomy and Astrophysics journal article: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202142484