The 64m radio telescope at Parkes Observatory. New technology - omni-directional antenna - is required for the LOFAR project

The UK physicists’ - from the University of Kent - role will be to search for signals which accompany the birth of stars.

The project will require the completion of arrays of antennas to detect radio waves at metre-long wavelengths. The low frequencies of these waves gives rise to the telescope by the name of LOFAR. The arrays will be spread across the Netherlands, Germany, France and Great Britain.

Michael Smith, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Kent, said: “The LOFAR project has been launched to advance upon instrumentation based on the old 1960s technologies of radio telescopes that used large mechanical dishes to collect signals which were then detected by a receiver for analysis.

“Even if scientists continued to use the old technologies, the instruments for this project would need to be one hundred times larger than existing ones, which is cost prohibitive as a high proportion of the outlay on these telescopes is the steel and moving structure. Therefore, new technology was required to make the next step in sensitivity necessary to unravel the secrets of the early universe.”

LOFAR is the first telescope of this new sort, using an array of simple omni-directional antennas instead of mechanical signal processing with a dish. The electronic signals from the antennas are digitised, transported to a central digital processor, and combined in software to emulate a conventional antenna.