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New paper: The Global Magneto-Ionic Medium Survey: A Faraday Depth Survey of the Northern Sky Covering 1280-1750 MHz

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The Galactic interstellar medium hosts a significant magnetic field, which can be probed through the synchrotron emission produced from its interaction with relativistic electrons. Linearly polarized synchrotron emission is generated throughout the Galaxy, and at longer wavelengths, modified along nearly every path by Faraday rotation in the intervening magneto-ionic medium. Full characterization of the polarized emission requires wideband observations with … Read More

New paper: HELP: The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project

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The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project (HELP) collates, curates, homogenises, and creates derived data products for most of the premium multi-wavelength extragalactic data sets. This is not an easy task, as each telescope used to collect data uses different resolutions, different types of light – wavelengths – and observes different types of objects. Some are point-like sources of light, others are … Read More

Virtual Reality and Immersive Collaborative Environments: the New Frontier for Big Data Visualisation

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The IDIA Vislab team has published a paper on their immersive visualisation work. They describe a software package they are busy developing: The iDaVIE software suite currently under development reads from both “volumetric data cubes” and “sparse multi-dimensional catalogs”, rendering them in a room-scale immersive environment that allows the user to intuitively view, navigate around and interact with features in … Read More

New paper on machine learning to characterise radio galaxies

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Classification of radio galaxies is looking at their shape, their morphology. Studying the shapes of galaxies in one thing we use to learn more about the formation and evolution of those great megacities of hundreds of billions stars, black holes and other cosmic beasts. Radio galaxies are galaxies that have very interesting features that are visible in radio wavelengths. Those … Read More

Cosmic beasts and where to find them

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Gigantic galaxies discovered with the MeerKAT telescope. Cover image: The two giant radio galaxies found with the MeerKAT telescope. In the background is the sky as seen in optical light. Overlaid in red is the radio light from the enormous radio galaxies, as seen by MeerKAT. Left: MGTC J095959.63+024608.6. Right: MGTC J100016.84+015133.0. Credit: I. Heywood (Oxford/Rhodes/SARAO). Two giant radio galaxies … Read More

Universities join forces in big data science – IDIA is renewed for 5 years

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The agreement forming the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy has been renewed by the University of Cape Town, the University of the Western Cape and the University of Pretoria for a period of five years. IDIA also welcomes a new partner in the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), who operates the MeerKAT telescope. IDIA is the main place … Read More

Dr. Brad Frank joins IDIA as Associate Director, Astronomy Operations

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We are delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Brad Frank in this position that will ensure that the research cloud is able to deliver on the needs of the astronomy research community, in particular for MeerKAT projects that are analysed on the ilifu facility. Dr. Frank first got involved with IDIA in 2016. Back then IDIA had just launched, … Read More

MIGHTEE-HI: The HI emission project of the MeerKAT MIGHTEE survey

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In this new paper, the observations of neutral hydrogen in the MIGHTEE survey conducted on the MeerKAT telescope are described. This particular project addresses 10 science questions, which shows the breadth of science that can be carried out thanks to the unique ability of MeerKAT to observe faint neutral hydrogen signals. Neutral Hydrogen, called HI (H – one) by astronomers, … Read More

New paper on galaxy evolution

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A new multi-wavelength analysis of 620 galaxies attempts to disentangle physical phenomena contributing to the galaxies brightness in radio waves. To properly understand the evolution of galaxies since the first galaxies I the early universe, we need to observe galaxies in different wavelengths, including visible light (optical), infrared, x-ray and radio. Each window of light “sees” different contributions to the … Read More