This impressive piece of old-school modelmaking was made at 1:12 scale – making it a neat metre and a half tall. It served as a display centrepiece in support of the LOFAR Low Frequency Array, an international network of radio telescopes coordinated by Astron in the Netherlands.
This is a model of the UK’s contribution to the LOFAR Array, and its addition makes the array over a thousand kilometers across. This enables radio astronomers to view objects and events that occurred billions of years ago in the deep reaches of space – including Quasars, objects that flare out so much energy they out-shine the light of the trillions of stars in their own galaxy.
