– how to filter out noise from our atmosphere. The sun charges the Earth’s atmosphere with particles that interfere with radio signals, making it difficult to capture a clear picture of the radio-emitting phenomena with ground-based radio telescopes.Credit – Leiden University / Sweijen et al.
That’s where the algorithm comes in. It uses statistical signal processing techniques to correct for radiation caused by the sun, allowing it to be removed from the data LOFAR collected. To do this required a lot of processing power, for which the team turned to supercomputers. They utilized the Academic Leiden Interdisciplinary Cluster Environment and Spider supercomputing platforms to parallelize the calculations that resulted in much higher resolution images that had previously been available. The resolution was so high, in fact, that one section, which was an area about the size of a full moon, would have as many pixels in it as a normal radio map of the complete sky.
AndyTomaswick What is 'battery imagery?'