Latest ASTRON Stories
The Federative Republic of Brazil has yesterday signed the formal accession agreement paving the way for it to become a Member State of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Following government ratification Brazil will become the fifteenth Member State and the first from outside Europe.On 29 December 2010, at a ceremony in Brasilia, the Brazilian Minister of Science and Technology, Sergio Machado Rezende and the ESO Director General, Tim de Zeeuw signed the formal accession agreement...
From the collaboration between Lowell Observatory, the largest private, non-profit astronomical research institution in the United States, and Discovery Communications Inc. is accomplished the $44 Million Discovery Channel Research Telescope designed with progeCAD. (PRWEB) November 24, 2010 The DCT is a 14 ft research class telescope situated at an elevation of 7,800 feet atop an ancient cinder cone approximately 40 miles southeast of Flagstaff, Arizona at a site called Happy Jack. It...
Stretching 100 kilometers through Chile's harsh Atacama Desert, a newly inaugurated data cable is creating new opportunities at ESO's Paranal Observatory and the Observatorio Cerro Armazones. Connecting these facilities to the main Latin American scientific data backbone completes the last gap in the high-speed link between the observatories and Europe.This new cable is part of the EVALSO (Enabling Virtual Access to Latin American Southern Observatories) project [1], a European Commission FP7...
Britain has officially opened the first station in a new global radio astronomy antenna network. Dubbed LOFAR (Low Frequency Array), the European project will employ new digital techniques to simultaneously survey large portions of space.The new station in Britain joins similar installations in Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Scientists hope the new network will enable them to explore the formation of the very first stars in the universe."In traditional arrays, you have...
Don Backer, a professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a world leader in the field of radio astronomy, died on Sunday, July 25, after collapsing outside his home. He was 66.Backer joined the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department in 1975; since 1989, he held a position both as a full professor in astronomy and as a researcher in the department's Radio Astronomy Laboratory (RAL). He served as chair of the department from 1998-1999 and from 2002-2008,...
Scientists unveiled the largest radiotelescope in the world on Saturday in the Netherlands. Femke Boekhorst of the Netherlands Radioastronomy Institute said the LOFAR (LOw Frequence ARray) consists of 25,000 small antennas measuring between 19 inches and 6 feet across, instead of a traditional large dish. The scientists say the telescope was capable of detecting faint signals from almost as far back as the Big Bang. The antennas are spread out across the Netherlands and also in Germany,...
ESO is releasing a beautiful image of the nearby galaxy Messier 83 taken by the HAWK-I instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The picture shows the galaxy in infrared light and demonstrates the impressive power of the camera to create one of the sharpest and most detailed pictures of Messier 83 ever taken from the ground.The galaxy Messier 83 is located about 15 million light-years away in the constellation of Hydra (the Sea Serpent). It spans over...
The SKA Program Development Office (SPDO) announced on May 11 the appointment of Mr Kobus Cloete to the role of Project Manager and Dr Minh Huynh to the role of Deputy International SKA Project Scientist. The appointments are made at a crucial stage in the finalization of the design for the world's largest radio telescope.Kobus will lead the growing international SKA development team and coordinate work on the technical design of the telescope. He gained extensive experience working in the...
Making the invisible visibleThe Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) partners in Germany, the U.S.A. and Italy are pleased to announce that the first of two new innovative near-infrared cameras/spectrographs for the LBT is now available to astronomers for scientific observations at the telescope on Mt. Graham in south-eastern Arizona. After more than a decade of design, manufacturing and testing, the new instrument, dubbed LUCIFER 1, provides a powerful tool to gain spectacular insights into the...
Pulsars in many octavesA unique combination of telescopes allowed astronomers to simultaneously observe the radio wavelength light from six different pulsars across wavelengths from only 3.5 centimetres up to 7 metres - a difference-factor of 200, providing an unprecedented view of how radio pulsars shine. For this world record in wavelength coverage, the international team, including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, used the new European LOFAR telescope, in...
Latest ASTRON Reference Libraries
Radio Astronomy -- Radio astronomy is the study of celestial phenomena through measurement of the characteristics of radio waves emitted by physical processes occurring in space. Radio waves are much longer than light waves. In order to receive good signals, radio astronomy requires large antennas. Radio astronomy is a relatively new field of astronomical research. The earliest investigations into extraterrestrial sources of radio waves were by Karl Guthe Jansky, an engineer with Bell...
Space Telescope Science Institute -- STScI mission statement: We bring the cosmos to Earth We carry out this vision by empowering the astronomy community to produce new scientific discoveries and by bringing the benefits of this research to the public. We make the best astronomical facilities productive for the largest number of scientists, and we promote new missions with the greatest potential for unlocking the secrets of the universe. We have done this with HST, and we will do...
National Radio Astronomy Observatory -- The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a research facility of the U.S. National Science Foundation. They provide state-of-the-art radio telescope facilities for use by the scientific community. They conceive, design, build, operate and maintain radio telescopes used by scientists from around the world. Scientists use their facilities to study virtually all types of astronomical objects known, from planets and comets in our own Solar...
European Southern Observatory -- ESO, the European Southern Observatory, was created in 1962 to: "establish and operate an astronomical observatory in the southern hemisphere, equipped with powerful instruments, with the aim of furthering and organising collaboration in astronomy". ESO is supported by Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. Other countries have expressed interest to become a member as well. ESO...
