Speaker
Description
With the onset of the SKA era, there is renewed focus on the low-frequency radio sky, with many technological advancements from the likes of GMRT, VLITE and the recent VLBI pipeline at 150 MHz with the International LOFAR Telescope (Morabito et al. 2022). In this talk, we present the first sub-arcsecond resolution image of the nearby galaxy M51 with LOFAR-VLBI, with a focus on the resolved radio emission and compact sources in the galaxy, especially supernovae. We compare the LOFAR-VLBI image with a higher frequency VLBI study (an EVN survey of M51; Rampadarath et al. 2015) and discuss supernovae, which have not yet been probed at these low radio frequencies. LOFAR-VLBI opens up uncharted territory to study these cosmic explosions and their interaction with the galaxy environment. Such low-frequency studies help us bridge the gap between our current understanding of various objects in the radio sky and what SKA will bring with it in the future. Last but not least, the technical developments associated with low-frequency instruments like LOFAR-VLBI will also help build calibration methodologies and other capabilities for handling data from the SKA.
