‘Beyond what we’d hoped’: international telescope in Australia captures first glimpse of the Universe
The first image from the international SKA Observatory’s telescope in Australia, SKA-Low, has been released – a significant milestone in its quest to reveal an unparalleled view of our Universe.
New Technology for Ultra-Fast Data Transfer: SURF and ASTRON Establish 400G Connection
SURF and ASTRON have implemented the OpenZR+ technology to establish a 400G network connection, significantly enhancing scientific research in the Netherlands.
Astronomers Astonished: Enigmatic Distant Radio Bursts Appear to be Neutron Stars
Using the radio telescope at Westerbork, The Netherlands, astronomers have discovered two dozen of the unexplained Fast Radio Bursts. After zooming in on the signal of the distant bursts, the astronomers found a striking similarity to the radio flashes emitted by nearby, known neutron stars. The discovery is remarkable because these nearby neutron stars already produce more energy than anything achievable on Earth. The distant stars that emit the Fast Radio Bursts must somehow generate an astounding one billion times more energy than the nearby ones.
European Pulsar Timing Array Wins Two Prestigious Awards
The European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) has been honored with two major awards for its groundbreaking work in gravitational wave astronomy. In 2024, the team received the International Congress of Basic Sciences (ICBS) Frontiers of Science Award in China, followed by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Group Achievement Award in the United Kingdom in 2025.These accolades celebrate the team’s innovative use of pulsar timing to detect low-frequency gravitational waves. The EPTA is a collaborative effort involving scientists from more than ten institutions across Europe. ASTRON is one of the participating organisations in this project with its most sensitive radio telescope including the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope. (WSRT).
FRB Representation Learning
© Dirk Kuiper / ASTRON
Each row shows a different type of FRB morphology, from simple narrowband pulses to scattered, drifting, and complex bursts — including real bursts detected by CHIME/FRB. The first column displays the original bursts, while the remaining columns show reconstructions made by the neural network using increasing numbers of latent variables, or compressed features.
With only one or two latent variables, the network can reconstruct only coarse structures — such as the average intensity and general shape of the burst. But as more latent variables are added (up to ten), the reconstructions progressively improve, recovering finer details like frequency structure, sub-burst drift, and even morphology differences across classes. This illustrates the model’s ability to balance compression and fidelity: capturing key physical features with minimal information.
Remarkably, the IOB-CAE also acts as a denoiser: even bursts with realistic CHIME-like noise are cleaned up in the reconstructions, preserving signal structure while suppressing background noise. This is especially visible in the final row.
These results demonstrate the potential of unsupervised deep learning models for understanding FRB populations. As we move toward a future of hundreds to thousands of bursts per day, tools like the IOB-CAE will help us automatically learn the key features of the data — without needing human labels.
CASPER Workshop 2025
Mon 08 Sep 2025 - Fri 12 Sep 2025
The CASPER workshop is a semi-annual workshop where FPGA, GPU, and general heterogeneous system programmers get together to discuss new instruments in radio astronomy, as well as the tools and libraries for developing and manipulating these instruments.