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Installation Manager Dereck McKay checks some of the new antennae at the Chilbolton Observatory near Andover, Hampshire. Students, lecturers and researchers mainly from the universities of Portsmouth, Oxford and Southampton are helping scientists at Chilbolton to install 96 radio antennae which are part of the European LOFAR project (Low Frequency Array), which, when completed, will consist of over 5000 separate antennae spread in stations all over Europe. Stations have already been completed in the Netherlands and Germany and others are planned in France, Sweden and Poland. The first major radio telescope to be built in Britain for many decades will 'listen' to the sky at FM frequencies, providing vast quantities of data to a super computer in the Netherlands, paving the way for unexpected new discoveries and potentially searching for alien intelligence. Astronomers hope to detect when the first stars in the Universe were formed and will observe some of the most distant galaxies, revealing more about how the Universe evolved.
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Installation Manager Dereck McKay checks some of the new antennae at the Chilbolton Observatory near Andover, Hampshire. Students, lecturers and researchers mainly from the universities of Portsmouth, Oxford and Southampton are helping scientists at Chilbolton to install 96 radio antennae which are part of the European LOFAR project (Low Frequency Array), which, when completed, will consist of over 5000 separate antennae spread in stations all over Europe. Stations have already been completed in the Netherlands and Germany and others are planned in France, Sweden and Poland. The first major radio telescope to be built in Britain for many decades will 'listen' to the sky at FM frequencies, providing vast quantities of data to a super computer in the Netherlands, paving the way for unexpected new discoveries and potentially searching for alien intelligence. Astronomers hope to detect when the first stars in the Universe were formed and will observe some of the most distant galaxies, revealing more about how the Universe evolved.