Commission J: Radio Astronomy

Radio Astronomy is very diverse and is studied by many UK universities. A very brief summary of notable UK activity in this area is summarised here:

• The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is a next generation radio telescope to be located in Australia and South Africa
  • The international SKA Headquarters is hosted at Jodrell Bank run by the University of Manchester
  • The UK lead two of the International Consortia developing the design of the SKA: Signal and Data Transport (Manchester); Science Data Processor (Cambridge)
  • In addition the UK plays key roles in other aspects of the SKA design: Central Signal Processor (Manchester, Oxford); Low Frequency Aperture Array (Cambridge, Oxford); Dish (Oxford); Telescope Manager (ATC Edinburgh); Mid Frequency Aperture Array (Manchester, Cambridge)
• The e-MERLIN/VLBI National Facility is the UK's facility for high resolution radio astronomy observations
  • e-MERLIN is comprised of seven radio telescopes spanning 217km operated by The University of Manchester for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
  •  e-MERLIN/VLBI National Facility provides the UK contribution to the European VLBI Network (EVN)
• The Arcminute Microkelvin Imager (AMI) is a dual array radio telescope purpose built for observations of clusters of galaxies
  • AMI is located at Lord’s Bridge and is operated by Cambridge University.
• The Lovell Telescope is a 76-m antenna which makes it the 3rd largest steerable dish radio telescope in the world.
  • The Lovell is located at Jodrell Bank and is operated by The University of Manchester.
• LOFAR is a radio telescope working at the lowest frequencies accessible from Earth. It involves many Universities across the UK and is led by ASTRON (Netherlands)
  • The UK LOFAR station is located at Chilbolton.
• C-BASS is a project to image the whole sky at a wavelength of six centimetres, measuring both the brightness and the polarization of the sky.
  • C-BASS is a collaboration between Oxford, Manchester, Caltech and South Africa
• QUIJOTE is dedicated to measure the polarization of the microwave sky in the frequency range between 11 GHz and 40GHz, and at angular scales of 1 degree.
  • QUIJOTE is a collaboration between IAC Tenerife, Manchester, Santander and Cambridge