For more than 10 years, an international team of researchers observed the northern hemisphere with the radio telescope LOFAR. Among those researchers were members from the universities of Hamburg, Bielefeld, Bochum, and Würzburg, as well as the Thuringian State Observatory Tautenburg and the Jülich Sumpercomputing Centre. The observational data of this sky survey has now been made available, and results were published in the scientific journal „Astronomy & Astrophysics“. The survey encompasses 13.7 million cosmic radio sources and thereby provides the most comprehensive inventory of active galaxies to date.
A selection of active galaxies. The jets appearing in the pictures are ejected by supermassive black holes that are present int he galactic centers. The image shows the variety of shapes that emerge from the activity of the black holes and their interaction with their respective surroundings. | Copyright: Maya Horton/LOFAR-Team
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