High energy astrophysics with the next generation of radio astronomy facilities

TL;DR

The paper discusses upcoming advancements in radio astronomy, especially LOFAR, and their potential to significantly enhance high energy astrophysics research over the next decade.

Contribution

It provides an overview of future radio facilities, emphasizing LOFAR's role in advancing high energy astrophysics and addressing past observational limitations.

Findings

LOFAR will enable new high-energy astrophysics observations.

Upcoming radio facilities will complement space-based high-energy missions.

Enhanced radio capabilities will improve understanding of microquasars and particle acceleration.

Abstract

High energy astrophysics has made good use of combined high energy (X-ray, gamma-ray) and radio observations to uncover connections between outbursts, accretion, particle acceleration and kinetic feedback to the local ambient medium. In the field of microquasars the connections have been particularly important. However, radio astronomy has been relying on essentially the same facilities for the past ~25 years, whereas high-energy astrophysics, in particular space-based research, has had a series of newer and more powerful missions. In the next fifteen years this imbalance is set to be redressed, with a whole familiy of new radio facilities under development en route to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in the 2020s. In this brief review I will summarize these future prospects for radio astronomy, and focus on possibly the most exciting of the new facilities to be built in the next decade, the Low Frequency Array LOFAR, and its uses in high energy astrophysics.