Supporting MeerKAT Science
In 2016, a workshop was organised by a collaboration of IDIA, SARAO, Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape and the University of KwaZulu-Natal to focus on the science that could be done with MeerKAT. At that time, eight MeerKAT Large Survey Projects (MLSPs) had already been nominated by SARAO for two thirds of MeerKAT’s first five years of operations. The MLSPs are ambitious scientific projects that require many hours of MeerKAT observations and open the door to entirely new scientific results.
In 2017, five of the MLSPs requested to use IDIA as their main data processing platform. In 2018, the first call for observing proposals for the remaining third of MeerKAT’s first five years of operations was issued by SARAO. Many researchers at IDIA partner universities were successful with their science proposals, and thus IDIA expects to become the platform of choice for most MeerKAT observations by those researchers and their collaborators.
IDIA-supported MeerKAT Large Survey Projects
MeerKAT Science news
- PRESS RELEASE! The Age of Giants: IDIA helps MeerKAT to identify a troublesome cosmic beast
With the help of IDIA facilities, South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope has uncovered an extraordinary new giant radio galaxy nicknamed ‘Inkathazo‘, meaning ‘trouble’ in the African Xhosa and Zulu languages. This discovery sheds light on the evolution of the largest structures in the Universe and offers new, yet confusing, insights into their mysterious origins. The work … Read More - MEDIA RELEASE: Meet the 49ers – 49 new galaxies found by MeerKAT and IDIA in a few hours
The 49ers – the 49 new gas-rich galaxies detected by the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. Each detection is shown as coloured contours, with redder colours indicating more distant gas from us, and bluer colours as closer gas. The background image comes from the optical PanSTARRS survey. Glowacki et al. 2024 The MeerKAT radio … Read More - CARTA 3.0 Released
The CARTA development team is excited to announce that CARTA v3.0 is now released! The development team has tried hard to elevate CARTA to a higher level over the last 14 months by adding important new features via three beta releases. In addition to the feature development, we also spent a significant amount of time … Read More - Are galaxies spinning in alignment with the cosmic web?
A new paper by the MIGHTEE-HI team reveals the connection between the direction of spin of galaxies and underlying large scale web of structure fund in the universe. Using a sample of 77 galaxies that are also known from other observations, the scientists calculated the axis around which the galaxies are spinning. If the background … Read More - Megamaser “Nkalakatha” discovered by astronomers using MeerKAT
Using the MeerKAT radio telescope, a team of researchers from the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town, Rhodes University, the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory and the South African Astronomical Observatory together with colleagues from twelve other countries have discovered a powerful megamaser – a radio-wavelength laser indicative of colliding galaxies. … Read More - MIGHTEE releases Early Science results
Since the MeerKAT radio telescope was inaugurated in 2018, is has been used extensively for observations for the MeerKAT Large Survey Projects, also called LSPs. Of the eight LSPs that were approved even before MeerKAT was ready for full operations, five projects process their data on the IDIA/ilifu research cloud. One of those projects is … Read More