Sweden's Minister for Education and Research, Jan Björklund, will open Onsala Space Observatory's newest telescope next Monday. Part of Lofar, the world's largest radio telescope, it is the biggest telescope built in Sweden in the last 35 years.
The 192 new radio antennas at Onsala's Lofar station will collect radio signals which will be linked together with 47 similar stations over the whole of Europe, and sent over Internet to a central supercomputer in the Netherlands. It allows large swathes of sky to be monitored.
- Onsala Space Observatory has always been a prominent centre for radio astronomy research, and now it's part of the world's most exciting radio telescope, says René Vermeulen of Astron, the Netherlands national institute for radio astronomy, and director of the International Lofar Telescope.
The Lofar telescope is extremely sensitive to the longest observable radio waves. It can see many billions of light years out into space, back to the time before the first stars formed, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
- For astronomers like me, Lofar means that we can see far enough to be able to study the universe's early history. We want to discover traces of the clouds of hydrogen gas that filled the universe 13 billion years ago, and find out just why today's universe looks the way it does, says Hans Olofsson director of Onsala Space Observatory and professor at Chalmers, in a press release.
Scientists expect Lofar to discover hitherto unknown types of astronomical objects. It will also investigate the environments of black holes, find extreme galaxies and pulsars, and search for planets around other stars.
During the inauguration ceremony Jan Björklund will take some of the first ever images of the sky with the Swedish Lofar station. He visits the station together with around a hundred invited guests.
Onsala Space Observatory is financed by the Swedish Research Council and operated by Chalmers.
