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One of the largest X-ray surveys using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space observatory has mapped nearly 12,000 X-ray sources across three large, prime regions of the sky. The X-ray sources represent active galactic nuclei and galaxy clusters, and the survey captures the growth of the supermassive black holes at the cores of these galaxies. This X-ray survey complements previous … Read More
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is a large interferometer radio telescope in Chile, one of the largest astronomy projects in existence, at least until the Square Kilometre Array is built. The ALMA Science Archive (ASA) contains the public and proprietary data of all ALMA observations. Through the Archive Query Interface, the user can constrain their search using various observational … Read More
The advent of very large telescopes, and their increasingly complex and voluminous data products, means digital astronomical data now needs special treatment to be understood. Simple two-dimensional graphs can no longer adequately portray the massive amounts of data pouring in from huge radio interferometers like ALMA, ASKAP, LOFAR, MeerKAT and soon the SKA, which perceive signals in higher spatial and … Read More
For the first time in the institution’s history, the University of Pretoria (UP) held its annual Academic Achievers’ Awards virtually. By no means, however, was the significance of this prestigious event dampened by what Vice-Chancellor and Principal Professor Tawana Kupe deems to have been “extraordinary circumstances”. “We have been celebrating UP’s academic achievers for more than 20 years,” Prof Kupe … Read More
The InspiringFifty SA Awards aims to recognise and the increase the visibility of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) who have advanced the STEM fields. InspiringFifty celebrates the diversity of the Top 50 women in STEM in South Africa thus publicly positioning these successful women as role models for the next generation of female leaders in their fields, … Read More
An SAAO Special Edition of NRF Science Matters Magazine Vol 3 Issue 3 was released by the National Research Foundation. This special edition of Science Matters focuses on the facilities, infrastructure and research themes through which South Africa punches well above its weight in the global Astronomy endeavour. The National Research Foundation hosts a variety of world-leading telescopes such as … Read More
The Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy (CARTA) is a new image visualization and analysis tool designed for ALMA, the VLA and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) pathfinder telescopes. CARTA is developed by a consortium of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA), the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), and the Department of Physics, University of Alberta. The CARTA development team is … Read More
The IDIA Pipelines team is pleased to announce V1.1 of the IDIA Pipeline. The package uses CASA/MPICASA to do the initial cross-calibration (1GC, a’priori) of MeerKAT data on the ilifu SLURM Cluster. This release implements the concurrent cross-calibration of spectral windows on the ilifu cluster and includes several tweaks to improve performance and stability. This release brings several scientific improvements … Read More
The Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) invites proposals from researchers at IDIA partner institutions and other South African institutions to conduct MeerKAT Open Time Project research using the Ilifu Cloud Computing Research Facility. Expressions of interest will be reviewed, and successful applicants will be provided a letter of support, which can be included in the associated MeerKAT observing … Read More
The University of the Western Cape (UWC)/Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA), Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF-IRA), and the Italian Embassy hosted the RADIOSKY2020 Workshop virtually on 18 June 2020. The RADIOSKY2020 project is funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) and the South African National Research Foundation (NRF). The meeting was organized … Read More
