Etienne Bonnassieux -- VLBI Perspectives for SKA pathfinders: from nearby galaxies to blazars and cosmological parameters

VLBI Perspectives for SKA pathfinders: from nearby galaxies to blazars and cosmological parameters

As the SKA begins to come online, its pathfinders find themselves looking for new frontiers to overcome. One avenue for scientific exploration is the expansion of existing arrays into the VLBI regime, with correlated signals spanning continents. The International LOFAR Telescope was always designed to perform this shift, and is currently becoming accessible to non-experts thanks to the availability of new pipelines. In this talk, I will outline a few scientific cases which benefit greatly from this decupling in the instrument's resolution, but will bring particular attention to the potential this opens at the very lowest frequencies (where NenuFAR operates), which are limited by the so-called confusion noise. I will finish by noting other opportunities for linking the VLBI experiments, and their scientific communities, with the current generation of more classical radio-interferometric arrays: in particular, I will discuss the perspectives of MeerKAT+, SKA-VLBI, and the ngVLA