In January, Trinity received €1.4 million investment from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) to construct a Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope in Birr, Co Offaly, marking the first major piece of investment in Irish astronomy for decades.
Little is known of the major progress Ireland has made in astronomy and the role it plays in space travel. Ireland, which has been a member of the ESA for over forty years, will spend €350 million between 2014-2020 on space agency projects. This most recent funding is just another example of the more ambitious funding decisions the government has taken in recent years.
Speaking in Trinity just over a week ago, the Director of the European Space Agency (ESA), Jan Wöerner, encouraged his audience to take up the “pioneering” legacy of European explorers of the past to discover and explore our universe. This most recent funding might allow Ireland to take up this challenge. The ESA Director also used the time to promote astronomy among his young audience, stating that there is still so much that we have yet to discover in our universe. He told the audience about his love of astronomy, his first telescope, his new Orion Eon 115 telescope, and his plans for the ESA, including the funding of the network radio telescopes.
LOFAR is a network of radio telescopes across Europe, built by the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy in 2006 at a cost of €150 million. The network stretches across the Netherlands, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Poland. The new Irish LOFAR (I-LOFAR) telescope now makes the telescope 30 per cent bigger, and will dramatically increase the sensitivity of LOFAR as a whole.
Since it was announced, the funding has caused an explosion of excitement across the astronomical community in Ireland. Speaking to The University Times, Prof Andrew Shearer, who lectures in astrophysics in NUI Galway, emphasised that the radio telescope will be the only ground-based, astronomical facility Irish scientists will have access to as a matter of right.
Shearer is already planning how the new telescope can benefit his own work: “I hope to persuade SFI to add a receiver onto I-LOFAR which would enable pulsar work to happen”. This could dramatically enhance Shearer’s research: “My own area is optical and high energy observations of pulsar, which are rapidly spinning neutron stars. These are normally observed on radio, and actually having a radio receiver in Ireland will be actually fundamental to that kind of work.”
While not possessing the glamour of NASA, nor the recognition the ESA enjoys, the LOFAR network is a crucial cog in our understanding of the universe. While most people might assume that our knowledge of the universe will be increased by some form of space exploration, the reality is that a lot of this research is undertaken by men and women with their feet firmly planted on terra firma. As Prof Mark Bailey, Director of Armagh Planetarium, tells The University Times: “Astronomy is one of those sciences that can be done with small laboratories because of the ability to communicate and collaborate around the world nowadays.”
As Wöerner emphasised in his lecture, space travel for the sake of space travel shouldn’t always be the end goal, especially when space exploration is notoriously expensive.
Most of the major discoveries of recent times have been achieved from these kinds of laboratories. Indeed, the suggestion in January that there may be a ninth planet in our solar system came not from from an organisation like NASA, but from two astronomers, Konstanin Batygin and Michael Brown, working in California Institute of Technology.
While no one The University Times spoke to was confident that this ninth planet could actually exist, it is exactly this sort of thing that the LOFAR network could aid in the search for. While he’s “sceptical” about such a discovery, Bailey acknowledged that such a theory will inevitably lead to a renewed focus on the fringes of our solar system: “This will stimulate a lot more activity to actually find it, because only then can you be sure.”
Prof Peter Gallagher, Associate Dean of Research and Professor in Astrophysics at Trinity, was confident that if the ninth planet does exist, there is no doubt that Ireland’s own radio telescope could play some role in finding it. Speaking to The University Times, he said: “The ninth planet is postulated from a theory, nobody has found it yet, so we’ve got to go out with telescopes and find it, so that’s really exciting. LOFAR will find planets, that’s the thing that it’s meant to do.”
While the focus of LOFAR is on making discoveries that exist way beyond our own solar system, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that a researcher at any of the nodes across Europe couldn’t stumble across data that confirms the existence of a ninth planet. And of course, why couldn’t that discovery be made in Ireland: “We should, with the entire network being bigger, we should be able to find more planets, so that’s exciting for us, and you know, if we could find this planet nine, wouldn’t that be amazing?”, noted Gallagher, who is also Director of the Rosse Solar-Terrestrial Observatory at Birr Castle, and chair of the Irish LOFAR Consortium.
That’s not to say that the rest of the work LOFAR is doing isn’t exciting. Gallagher tells me: “They can use LOFAR to make images of the early universe, just after the Big Bang, so they can study the structure of the Big Bang, or after the Big Bang, and that structure tells us about the way the universe evolved.”
Yet Birr Castle is home to its own optical telescope, and has an illustrious history of space discovery. The Leviathan telescope, built in 1845 by the William Parsons, third Earl of Rosse and a Trinity graduate, was the largest telescope in the world for over 70 years. Using the telescope, Parsons was the first to reveal the spiral nature of some of our galaxies.
Despite that promising start, Irish astronomy has failed to progress in recent years. Most of this has been due to a lack of funding. Something has left Irish astronomy relatively underdeveloped: “I think over the past 100 years you could say, or for a very long time, Irish astronomy hasn’t received a large amount of funding, and we’re way behind the curve in international terms”, Gallagher said.
With the €1.4 million in funding from SFI however, it seems Irish astronomers can afford themselves some optimism. The timing of the launch of LOFAR in 2006 couldn’t have come at a worse time for Ireland, with the rapid decline of the Irish economy in the intervening years meaning the Irish government was choosing research projects to support very carefully.
In recent years however, things are slowly changing. “Now that things are improving, the government is investing a little more broadly in the kind of work that it does”, Gallagher says.
Indeed, Bailey emphasised that, while we’ve arrived late to the project, the future is bright for Ireland’s impact on LOFAR: “We’ve come into a project that is already flourishing, and that is an advantage to us.” While he admits it’ll be a “long slog” to get the project to the level of the other nodes across Europe, and will require additional investment, Bailey is already planning on how he can use the I-LOFAR in his research into ultra-cool dwarf stars: “These stars are known to emit radio waves, but it’s not really known how it works, so any new instrument like LOFAR will be used to provide new data and therefore improve the ability to test new theories.”
However, this latest node of the LOFAR network isn’t the only Irish connection to the network. Prof George Miley, a graduate of University College Dublin, actually invented the LOFAR network. It was in 1997 that he proposed the idea for a radio telescope, with 7000 antennae stretching across Europe, with work beginning on the network in 2006. Miley is still an astronomy professor at the University of Leiden, and in 2003 was awarded the prestigious Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) professorship.
It is hoped the new I-LOFAR telescope will inspire more of this talent and passion. As early as undergraduate level, Gallagher is confident students from across Ireland will be able to use this world class piece of equipment: “We’ll have undergraduate projects involved in it, for scientists, and for hopefully engineers, and computer scientists as well, they should be able to use it.”
The aim of inspiring a new generation of George Miley’s is something that everyone I speak to seems to emphasise. Prof Shearer said: “If we have students, and we don’t have access to those facilities, they’ll be very tempted to go elsewhere, and then we’ll lose that kind of expertise.”
For him, it’s that first impulse of fascination in the universe that leads so many of our best scientists into the sector: “They might not go on to become astronomers, but they’ll go on to be extremely good scientists for both academia and for industry. What we want to try and do is to encourage them to try and stay in the country and learn, and to actually help research projects which have an Irish angle.”
