#lofar

The comic volcano J1007+3540,

The eruption of a once dormant black hole, as seen by LOFAR !

Astronomers have discovered a once-dormant supermassive black hole springing back to life in a very dramatic and spectacular fashion, acting as a "cosmic volcano" blasting out an eruption that stretched out for 1 million light-years.

The supermassive black hole in question sits at the heart of the galaxy J1007+3540 and has lain dormant for around 100 million years.

Script&Gears -> Flowers&Glass -> Ruins&Shade -> Waves&Frogs -> Crystal&Sky -> Moonlight&Rime ->

Forest&Rain & Glaciers&Lights

Spires&Storms & Winds&Trade

Roses&Mθs & Graveyards&Gourds

Stormstuck

4.4 Million Galaxies Mapped

I can hardly get my mind around the distances between stars, never mind the 100 billion stars in our own galaxy, spread across over 100,000 light years. Now imagine we mapped 4.4 million galaxies, and were able to show this in a map, and this is what astronomers at Durham University have done, using data from LOFAR have done.

Each of those small specks of dust in the map don't just represent a single galaxy, but rather, the most energetic objects in our universe, quasars, galaxy clusters containing numerous supermassive black holes, like the Virgo clusters M87 galaxy.

Our own galaxy isn't very noisy in comparison, our supermassive black hole is like a dormant volcano, it's not dead, it still has magma but just isn't erupting, many galaxies around us have very active supermassive black holes, and many groups of galaxies are merging and forming super clusters with many of these kinds of galaxies.

The universe is unimaginably large, but work like this, helps us to begin to process the scale, even if it's simply to expand whatever we thought it was in the first instance.

LOFAR and New Way to Find Exoplanets

Exoplanets have been coming in thick and fast over the last few decades, with currently around 4,500 confirmed planets, with another 5000 odd candidates waiting for additional sightings to confirm.

Despite the numbers, planet finding is still lacking in certain areas, it's great at finding very large planets very close in to the star, or planets that pass between us and the star, causing the light to dip which again favours the larger and closer in planets.

Large planets far enough to be visible are also a possibility, but finding small rocky planets in the habitable zone still remains a difficult task.

This is where LOFAR comes in, a vast array of radio telescopes stretched across Europe, and particularly well suited to low radio frequencies, the very radio frequencies our own planet gives off in Aurora, the interaction between our planet and the stellar outbursts which flood our area of space from time to time.

So, LOFAR has begun checking out potential stars, and teamed up with TESS to keep an eye on the star itself to make sure anything detected wasn't just the star behaving badly. Between the two of them, they have found their first candidate in Ursa Major, a red dwarf around 26 light years from Earth called GJ1151

Hercules A - Supermassive Black Hole Jets

In new recent images taken by LOFAR (Low Frequency Array radio telescope) show huge jets emanating from a supermassive black hole over 2 billion light years from us at the centre of the galaxy 3C 348.

When these black holes start to feed, a huge amount of matter superheated to plasma is shot out from the poles of the black hole at near the speed of light, and creates these amazing jets which show up brightly in radio waves.

The galaxy itself is a giant elliptical galaxy similar to M87 where the first picture of a black hole came from, but 1000 times the size of the Milky Way. The black hole is also thought to be 1000 times the size of Sag A*, around 4 billion solar masses, it's quite a monster.

LOFAR has also been busy looking to galaxies at the edge of our ability to view, some 11+ billion light years from us.

Imagine you point your telescope at an otherwise dark part of the sky, but then leave it on collecting data until you have 4 Petabytes of data representing every radio wave it collected, and then imagine your telescope happens to be amongst the most sensitive radio telescopes in the world, but is tagged along with an entire array of them spanning half of Europe !

This is what an international team of astronomers have been getting up to recently, the idea being to detect some of the most distant (and therefore youngest) galaxies and to cut through all the dust and gas obscuring them as radio waves do.

Some of the background objects in this image are galaxies created not that long after the big bang, and some of the larger structures are radio galaxies, galaxies with supermassive black holes shredding everything and spewing out radiation that stretches for thousands and even millions of light years out.

Spotting the Magnetic Fields of Exoplanets

Searching for Exoplanets is an ever improving science, and LOFAR Radio Telescope has come up with yet another method, finding a new Brown Dwarf over 212 light years from Earth in the process.

Brown Dwarfs are not quite stars, and in many respects are exoplanets in their own right, however the small amount of fusion and their massive size (being between 15 - 75 times the mass of Jupiter) make them a little easier to spot than most exoplanets that only reveal their presence by the interference with their host star. 

LOFAR looks at the radio waves, but is able to measure the magnetic fields at source, and has now refined this to the point of being able to spot a magnetic field similar to that of a fridge magnet. 

It’s thought the magnetic field of a Brown Dwarf isn’t much different to that of planets the size of Jupiter, so the same technique could now be used to look for Jupiter sized planets circling further out from their star or even to answer how many of them are moving through interstellar space. 

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