News

PRESS RELEASE! IDIA helps UP-led astronomy research team to explore the formation of giant radio galaxies

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Using the supercomputing power provided by IDIA facilities and groundbreaking observations from new-generation radio telescopes such as MeerKAT, an international research team, led by postdoctoral fellow Dr. Gourab Giri and other researchers at the University of Pretoria (UP), has made a breakthrough in understanding the formation and evolution of giant radio galaxies. These cosmic behemoths, resembling massive fountains of superheated … Read More

PRESS RELEASE! The Age of Giants: IDIA helps MeerKAT to identify a troublesome cosmic beast

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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 has been published in the … Read More

CALLING ALL ilifu USERS! ilifu Astronomy User Survey 2024

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We are pleased to invite you to complete our ilifu Astronomy User Survey 2024! We strive to provide the best service to our users, especially in light of the many amazing MeerKAT science projects that have a home at IDIA. It is crucial that we have feedback from our user community, and this survey will help us to ensure that … Read More

PRESS RELEASE: Public release of the iDaVIE Virtual Reality software by the IDIA Vislab

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Cape Town, South Africa – October 1, 2024  The Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) and the Department of Astronomy at the University of Cape Town (UCT) are proud to announce the first public release of the innovative iDaVIE software by the IDIA Visualisation Lab (IDIA Vislab). This milestone marks a significant advancement in astronomy data visualisation and analysis, … Read More

NSTF-South32 Awards – winners!!!

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IDIA Wins at the 2023/2024 NSTF-South32 Awards! We are happy to announce that IDIA has won the NSTF-South32 Special Annual Theme Award for 4th Industrial Revolution in South Africa! The hybrid gala events of the 26th NSTF-South32 Awards took place simultaneously in Johannesburg, Cape Town and online during the evening of Thursday, 11 July 2024. This prestigeous awards ceremony, which is the … Read More

NEW IDIA-EMPOWERED PHD GRADUATE! Dr Charissa Button becomes UP’s first PhD graduate in Astrophysics

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Dr Charissa Button has made history by becoming the University of Pretoria’s (UP, one of IDIA’s partner Universities) first PhD graduate in Astrophysics (capped during the University’s autumn graduation ceremonies). During Dr Button’s PhD research, she made use of IDIA infrastructure and MeerKAT data to study how gravitational lensing can be used as an approach to probe the more distant … Read More

JOB ADVERT: DIRECTOR (PROFESSOR) – IDIA POSITION

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The Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA), established in 2015, is a partnership of three South African universities: the University of Cape Town, the University of Pretoria and the University of the Western Cape with the aims to build capacity and expertise in data intensive astronomy in the partner institutions and to provide systems and solutions for converting data … Read More

MEDIA RELEASE: Meet the 49ers – 49 new galaxies found by MeerKAT and IDIA in a few hours

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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 telescope in South Africa has … Read More

The World’s Largest International Astronomy Meeting will be held in Africa and Open to the Public for the first time.

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Registrations Now Open for the Historic International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly 2024 Promoting Open, Impactful, and Sustainable Science The National Organising Committee of the 32nd International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly (GA) is excited to announce that registrations are now officially open for the IAU GA 2024. This pivotal event marks a groundbreaking moment as the triennial IAU GA will, … Read More

New Release of CARTA V4.0 

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The CARTA development team is happy to announce that CARTA v4.0-stable is now released! Over the past year, the development team has worked on implementing new features to improve CARTA support in more use cases. In addition to new feature development, we fixed bugs from v3.0-stable and maintained the codebase.Please visit the CARTA homepage to obtain CARTA v4.0-stable. The user … Read More