New telescope with an ‘ear on the universe’ to answer if we are alone

The University of Southampton has played a key role in the first major radio telescope to be built in Britain for many decades, which will help answer questions such as ''Are we alone?'' and ''How did black holes grow in our universe?''

The telescope, which is part of the European LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) project, will 'listen' to the Universe at FM frequencies, helping astronomers detect when the first stars in the Universe were formed and to reveal more about how the Universe evolved.

It was officially opened yesterday (20 September) by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered the first radio pulsars, at a ceremony at the Chilbolton Observatory, near Andover in Hampshire, which is part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

Professor Rob Fender of the University of Southampton, Principal Investigator of the LOFAR UK project, said: ''The most amazing thing is that these small dipole antennas can pick up faint radio signals from over 10 billion years ago, when the universe was a fraction of its current size, and that this signal can be mapped over the entire sky by the telescope without a single moving part.''

LOFAR is a European project being led by ASTRON (the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy) which when complete, will see over 5,000 separate antennas grouped into 'stations' all over Europe, including the Chilbolton Observatory, to form the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope.

LOFAR works at the lowest frequencies accessible from Earth which, combined with the latest in high-tech computing, allows wide areas of the sky to be surveyed opening up new possibilities for astronomers.