Sweden has long history of involvement in both long baseline radio interferometry (Onsala Space Observatory) and in radio space physics (IRF). The first discussions of a Swedish contribution to LOFAR began with the ongoing LOIS project (IRF, Uppsala). Last year VR's Infrastructure committee KFI approved the construction of a LOFAR station at Onsala. This contribution has made Sweden a recognised full member of the international (European) LOFAR effort, which allows Swedish scientists special access to the instrument.
LOFAR is a low frequency radio telescope that will be studying radio emission in the frequency ranges 30-70MHz and 120-240MHz, for more information see the LOFAR website. Countries already involved are the Netherlands, Germany, UK and France. Countries such as Italy, Poland and Ukraine are considering joining.
We are now organizing a one-day information meeting for Swedish scientists who want to know more about LOFAR, and find out how it could be relevant for their research, and how they can get involved.
The meeting will take place in Stockholm, at the AlbaNova University Center on Thursday January 15, 2009, starting at 10:00am and ending at 5pm.
Programme before lunch (room FA32)
- 10:00 - 10:10 Welcome - Mellema (Stockholm)
- 10:10 - 10:40 Overview of LOFAR - Rene Vermeulen (ASTRON, NL)
- 10:40 - 10:50 The Onsala LOFAR station - John Conway (OSO/Chalmers)
- 10:50 - 11:20 Galaxy Surveys KSP* - Huub Röttering (Leiden, NL)
- 11:20 - 11:50 Transients and time dependent sources KSP - Ralph Wijers (Amsterdam, NL)
- 11:50 - 12:10 Accretion flows onto magnetised compact objects - Ulf Torkelsson, (Göteborg)
- 12:10 - 12:30 Epoch of Reionization KSP - Garrelt Mellema, (Stockholm)
- 12:30 - 13:30 Lunch
Programme after lunch (room FB42)
- 13:30 - 14:00 LOIS, Solar Physics, Space Weather KSP and New Radio Methods - Bo Thide (Uppsala)
- 14:00 - 14:20 The New EISCAT 3D incoherent scatter Radar Project - Gudmund Wanneberg (EISCAT)
- 14:20 - 14:50 Cosmic ray KSP - Heino Falcke (Nijmegen, NL)
- 14:50 - 15:20 The Square Kilometre Array and its precursurs - Arnold van Ardenne (ASTRON / Chalmers)
- 15:20 - 15:40 Coffee Break
- 15:40 - 16:40 General discussion - future Swedish involvement in LOFAR
To give an idea of the wide scope of the possibilities of LOFAR we list here a number of the subjects which have been discussed as a recent European LOFAR meeting in Hamburg. Presentations from this meeting can be found at this website
- Transient sources (GRBs, SNe, other flaring sources)
- XRBs
- Pulsars
- Planets, exoplanets and SETI
- Solar Physics and space weather
- Cosmic rays
- Neutrino astronomy (nuMoon)
- The Epoch-of-Reionisation
- Cosmic magnetism
- (wide area) Imaging surveys
- Galactic structure and ISM
- Strong lensing
- Clusters and halos
- Radio galaxies and AGN
- SNRs, PWNe
- Starburst galaxies
- Lightning
Invited speakers:
- René Vermeulen (ASTRON) - LOFAR
- John Conway (Onsala) - The Onsala LOFAR station
- Heino Falcke (Radboud Univ. Nijmegen) - Cosmic Ray showers
- Ralph Wijers (Univ. of Amsterdam) - Transients and time-dependent sources
- Huub Röttgering (Univ. of Leiden) - Galaxy Surveys
- Garrelt Mellema (Stockholm) - Epoch of Reionization
- Bo Thidé (Inst. Space Physics) - LOIS, Solar & Space weather, and new radio methods
