Southwestern Consortium pursues radio telescope project

Contact: Todd Hanson, tahanson@lanl.gov, (505) 665-2085 (03-077)

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LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 11, 2003 -- Working closely with Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of the Southwest Consortium, officials at the University of New Mexico announced today that they are leading the effort to propose a new low frequency radio astronomy observatory be built in a region covering New Mexico and Western Texas. The Southwest Consortium, whose members also include New Mexico Tech, New Mexico State University, the Applied Research Laboratory of the University of Texas – Austin, and the University of Colorado, will work together to advocate a site for the planned Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope. LOFAR will be similar to the Very Large Array (VLA) telescope near Socorro, N.M. but will be more widely distributed across the region and will operate at longer wavelengths.

"Our Southwest site probably provides the best location to achieve the science objectives set by LOFAR, and, with our existing infrastructure in roads, power and fiber-optics, this can be done for a very reasonable cost," said Terry Yates, UNM's Vice Provost for Research. "The proposed co-location of LOFAR in the vicinity of the VLA would also provide a unique scientific synergy."

The LOFAR project was proposed by an international consortium of radio astronomers seeking a suitable site to locate the telescope. MIT's Haystack Observatory, ASTRON in the Netherlands, and the Naval Research Laboratory make up that consortium. Competing sites for the location of LOFAR are in Western Australia, and in and around the Netherlands in northern Europe. The Southwest Consortium has submitted their proposal to the international consortium for consideration. As part of the project review process, members of the international organization will visit the Southwest this week to see firsthand the advantages of the region for LOFAR.

LOFAR is perhaps best described as a "software radio observatory" since much of the power of the instrument will not reside in specialized hardware, as in the Very Large Array, but rather in the advanced, high performance computing technology that will combine the signals from tens of thousands of individual antenna elements to form images. LOFAR will consist of 100 separate stations––each station roughly a football field in size and composed of 100 or more dual-polarization antennas––scattered across an area about 500 km in diameter.

LOFAR will be used to study a number of astronomical phenomena, including the evolution of galaxies and the Universe itself, radio transient sources, the physics of intergalactic magnetic fields, the history of supernovae, and the energetic processes near black holes. Planetary astronomers will be able to use the instrument to study the interaction of the solar wind with the planets and look for lightning on the gas giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. LOFAR will be an ideal instrument with which to study the radio emissions from the Sun. More information about the LOFAR project can be found at www.lofar.org.

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