European Pulsar Timing Array Wins Two Prestigious Awards
The European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) has been honored with two major awards for its groundbreaking work in gravitational wave astronomy. In 2024, the team received the International Congress of Basic Sciences (ICBS) Frontiers of Science Award in China, followed by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Group Achievement Award in the United Kingdom in 2025.These accolades celebrate the team’s innovative use of pulsar timing to detect low-frequency gravitational waves. The EPTA is a collaborative effort involving scientists from more than ten institutions across Europe. ASTRON is one of the participating organisations in this project with its most sensitive radio telescope including the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope. (WSRT).
Roelien Attema named as Netherlands Academy of Engineering Fellow
ASTRON’s head of the Innovation & Systems department, Roelien Attema, has been named as one of the ten new Fellows of the Netherlands Academy of Engineering (NAE). The appointment recognises her outstanding achievements in technology valorisation and visionary leadership in research and development.
Using short radio flashes to probe the remnants of neutron star mergers
What happens after neutron stars merge? Dr. Antonia Rowlinson has received an ERC Consolidator Grant to find an answer to that fundamental question.
LOFAR1 operations stopped, telescope gearing up for 2.0 upgrade
August 31st was the last day on which we received data from LOFAR1. With the shutdown of LOFAR1 operations, over a decade of gathering and handling huge amounts of data came to an end. LOFAR1 operations have led to the publication of more than 750 scientific papers so far, and this number is still growing by about two papers per week. The end of LOFAR1 production operations does of course not mean the end of LOFAR (which became LOFAR ERIC last year): right now we are working hard on upgrading the LOFAR telescope to version 2.0, both in software and hardware.
2nd year research practicum at UvA and ASTRON
© Ziggy Pleunis/ASTRON
For their project the students measured the spin period of the first pulsar discovered by Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, B1919+21, in LOFAR data. They also analyzed a series of LOFAR observations of pulsar J1810+1744, a source discovered by Jason Hessels, and rediscovered that this pulsar is in an eclipsing binary system. They were able to estimate the mass of the pulsar's binary companion based on the changes in the pulsar spin period over time, from the Doppler shift induced by the binary orbit, and they observed how the free electron density in the line of sight towards the pulsar changes around the eclipse.
The students left with a good understanding of all it takes to design, build and operate a radio telescope and felt the joy of discovery when observations show something unexpected. Thank you to everyone at ASTRON for making the students feel welcome and hopefully we'll see some of them again soon for another research project in radio astronomy!