Westerbork VLBI Facility
Westerbork VLBI Facility
The Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) is a powerful radio telescope and is a vital station of the European VLBI Network (EVN), a network of radio telescopes located primarily in Europe and Asia. The EVN is the most sensitive VLBI array in the world. Its importance will increase in the LOFAR2 and SKA era, when it will bid to host the leadership of the world-wide SKA-VLBI network. Additionally, the telescopes at Westerbork are intended to be upgraded for use as downlinks for the next generation of space-based radio interferometry pathfinders, in development in the next decade.
Infrastructure and User Services
The Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope comprises 14, 25-meter equatorial dish antennas. The WSRT dishes lie along an east-west track, of length (baseline) 2.7 km. The site is located in an area with significant radio frequency interference protection.
ASTRON curates various data collections for its facilities and offers them to the worldwide user community: WSRT-APERTIF Survey data (intermediate and science-ready products) are hosted in the APERTIF Long Term Archive (ALTA) and are exposed to the community through the ASTRON Virtual Observatory (VO). Former WSRT data are hosted in the WSRT science archive and exposed via the WSRT online archive interface.
The EVN is an "open skies" facility. Support for proposal preparation, scheduling, and correlation of EVN projects is provided by the Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC (JIVE). JIVE staff are also able to support EVN users with data analysis, for the best science to emerge.
Examples/description of the type of research
The EVN performs very high-resolution studies of the radio sky by combining data from distributed telescopes worldwide..
Research with the EVN covers a broad range of topics from Galactic to extragalactic astronomy and astrophysics. The VLBI technique provides the highest angular resolution imaging in astronomy, and among all the VLBI networks, the EVN is the most sensitive. This unique infrastructure is expected to make important contributions for example in the following research areas: strong field tests of gravity, growth of the first generation supermassive black holes, detection of dark matter mini-halos at cosmological distances, supernovas hidden in starburst galaxies, ultra-precise astrometry of pulsars to aid the detection of the gravitational-wave background, kinematics and magnetic fields in star formation and evolution. There is demonstrated potential for the EVN to make more impact in the areas of geodetic VLBI, satellite tracking applications, and in planetary science as well.
How to access the infrastructure ?
Scientists/users don’t have access to the telescope directly. Observing requests are submitted to and executed by the operational staff. The resulting data products are provided to the scientists. Archived data products are exposed to the community through the ASTRON Virtual Observatory (VO).