MANCHESTER, England, April 14 (UPI) -- A powerful new telescope in Europe will give the best-ever look at pulsars, rapidly spinning neutron stars created when massive stars die, astronomers said.
The first scientific results from the new European LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) telescope have given scientist the most sensitive, low-frequency observations of pulsars ever made, a release from the University of Manchester reported Thursday.
Deep observation of pulsars is a key goal of LOFAR, one of a new generation of huge radio telescopes intended to study the sky at the lowest radio frequencies accessible with unprecedented resolution.
"We are returning to the frequencies where pulsars were first discovered, but now with a telescope of a sophistication that could not have been imagined back in the 1960s," Benjamin Stappers, of Manchester's school of physics and astronomy, said.
The chance detection of the first pulsar in 1967, using a radio telescope sensitive to frequencies of 81MHz, roughly the same frequency as a commercial FM radio station, is considered one of the most important discoveries in astronomy.
LOFAR works by connecting thousands of small antennas spread across Europe using high-speed Internet connections and a massive supercomputer near its central core at The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy.
