Speaker
Description
The LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) is one of the world's leading observatories at low radio frequencies. With its pan-European baselines reaching up to 2000 km in length, it is capable of achieving sub-arcsecond angular resolution at frequencies below 200 MHz. However, the use of its international baselines has been hindered for most of the current lifetime of the observatory, due to technical and logistical challenges: its phased-array design, the ionosphere, lack of known suitable calibrator sources, and lacking software tools. For this reason, many projects have relied only on the Dutch part of the array, using baselines up to 120 km. Thanks to the Long Baseline Working Group, a strategy has been developed to enable the calibration of the international stations. This has unlocked the highest resolutions (~0.3 arcseconds) attainable with LOFAR, enabling a wide variety of research for the first time. In this talk, I will present the details of the calibration strategy, recent scientific results, the current development status of the pipeline, and a future outlook for what to expect from the International LOFAR Telescope in the near future.
