LOFAR team produces sharpest, deepest low-frequency radio map of a sky patch

By the Everything Space news desk · 06 Nov 2026 · written from the sources below

Image: Phys.org

The ultra-detailed image of nearly 63,000 radio sources gives astronomers a new tool to study black hole jets and hidden star formation in distant galaxies.

An international team led by Leiden University has released the most detailed and sensitive radio image ever captured at low frequencies using the Low Frequency Array telescope network. The image maps a region of sky about 25 times larger than the full moon and reveals nearly 63,000 radio sources, including galaxies powered by active black holes and galaxies undergoing vigorous star formation.

The target field, known as ELAIS-N1, is a well-studied patch of northern sky known for containing many faint, distant galaxies. The new image is 20 times sharper than the previous best version of this region made with the same telescope array, with a resolution fine enough to distinguish a coin-sized object from several kilometers away. The final image contains 8 billion pixels.

Producing the image required processing roughly 400 terabytes of data gathered over 200 hours of observation. Until recently, handling this volume of data at such high resolution was computationally out of reach, but the researchers and their collaborators developed improved calibration and data-reduction techniques that sharply cut processing costs in recent years, allowing the full dataset to be processed in a matter of months using a high-performance computing platform in the Netherlands.

The dataset has been made public so other astronomers can combine it with observations from optical, infrared and X-ray telescopes covering the same patch of sky, which would let researchers determine distances and masses for the detected sources.

A major feature of the image is the detailed view of active galactic nuclei, the luminous cores of galaxies fueled by supermassive black holes that can launch powerful jets of material. At lower resolution such jets and galaxies often appear as indistinct blobs, making it hard to tell whether emission comes from jets or widespread star formation. The new resolution allows researchers to separate these components and trace jet structures in detail, offering a clearer view of how such jets evolve and interact with their surroundings over cosmic time.

The image also captures numerous small, actively star-forming galaxies. Because radio waves pass through the dust that can obscure star formation from optical or infrared telescopes, the observations provide an unobscured look at star birth in distant galaxies, aiding studies of galaxy evolution across cosmic history.

The researchers say the results demonstrate the capabilities expected from an upgrade to the telescope network, which aims to produce even sharper, wider, and more sensitive images and remain competitive as a new, larger radio observatory currently under construction becomes operational.

Written in Everything Space’s own words by our news-desk model from the sources above, and checked against them in code: every number in this report appears in its sources, and no sentence is copied from them.