The first ‘radio pictures from the largest telescope in the world have revealed images of a quasar (a black hole in a distant galaxy) with unprecedented resolution. The images of the 3C196 quasar were taken by the International Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) Telescope, a network of radio telescopes designed to study the sky at the lowest radio frequencies accessible from the surface of the Earth.

The new UK telescope, connected for the first time to others across Europe, was created to discover more about our universe and the birth of stars and galaxies.  The UK-based telescope at the Chilbolton Observatory in Hampshire is the western most ‘telescope station’ in LOFAR.  The facility is owned by the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC), one of the partners in the LOFAR-UK project along with researchers from 22 UK universities, including the Universities of Portsmouth, Oxford and Southampton as part of the SEPnet-Astro research theme.

The addition of Chilbolton to other stations in Europe makes the LOFAR array almost 1000km wide – 10x as large as the original array in the Netherlands – and creates the largest telescope in the world capable of generating images three times sharper than has been previously possible. The first images show a patch of the sky 15⁰ wide (as large as a thousand full moons) centred on the quasar 3C196.

David Bacon, from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation, said: "It's fantastically exciting that we can get this amount of detail from images of the distant Universe – all thanks to the Chilbolton radio receivers working together with those in other countries. Now we can use LOFAR to ask some of the big questions such as how is gravity spread out in Universe? And what is going on with the mysterious dark energy that is pushing the galaxies apart faster and faster?"

“This is a very significant event for the LOFAR project and a great demonstration of what the UK is contributing,” said Derek McKay-Bukowski, STFC/SEPnet Project Manager at LOFAR Chilbolton. "LOFAR works like a giant zoom lens - the more radio telescopes we add, and the further apart they are, the better the resolution and sensitivity. This means we can see smaller and fainter objects in the sky which will help us to answer exciting questions about cosmology and astrophysics.”

Dr Philip Best, Deputy LOFAR-UK leader from the University of Edinburgh. “Even through the Hubble Space Telescope, in visible light quasar 3C196 is a single point. By adding the international stations like the one at Chilbolton we reveal two main bright spots. This shows how the International LOFAR Telescope will help us learn about distant objects in much more detail.”

LOFAR was designed and built by ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Netherlands and is currently being extended across Europe. As well as deep cosmology, LOFAR will be used to monitor the Sun’s activity, study planets, and understand more about lightning and geomagnetic storms. LOFAR will also contribute to UK and European preparations for the planned global next generation radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

Karen Masters from ICG said: "The amount of details shown in these images from LOFAR is absolutely astonishing. If your eye could see as well as LOFAR you could tell the time by looking at Big Ben from Amsterdam. This is all thanks to the addition of far flung stations like the one in Chilbolton."

Source: University of Porsmuth