Kechil Kirkham, Project Manager of IDIA, has several strings to her bow. One of them is Looking Up, a radio programme and podcast with Cape Town radio station Fine Music Radio. On 1 October 2025 the 1,000th show will be broadcast. Looking Up is a weekly 5-minute programme covering space and astronomy, which now reaches a quarter of million people … Read More
IDIA is seeking an experienced systems administrator to join a team that works on supporting OpenStack cloud systems for use by IDIA researchers. Experience working with big data projects in areas such as Astronomy, High Energy Physics, Omics or Earth Observation Science will be an asset. The systems administrator will work closely with the IDIA systems and support teams and will be … Read More
A team of astronomers, led by the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences-IPM (IPM) and including scientists from the Inter-university Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) and the University of Oxford, has studied a sample of distant galaxies by means of their radio emission, observed with the MeerKAT radio telescope — a precursor to what will become the world’s largest … Read More
A new release of CARTA is out: this is the stable v5.0 release, following the related beta release in February 2025. Like the beta release, this contains the new major features: channel map view and an RGB colour blender. There have been many bug fixes and enhancements, as well as substantial code refactoring since the previous release. For more details please see … Read More
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
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
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
UPDATE: Position is now filled. IDIA is seeking an experienced systems administrator to join a team that works on supporting OpenStack cloud systems for use by IDIA researchers. Experience working with big data projects in areas such as Astronomy, High Energy Physics, Omics or Earth Observation Science will be an asset. The systems administrator will work closely with the IDIA systems and … Read More
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 refactoring the codebase so that … Read More
By Roger Deane and Iniyan Natarajan Astronomers have revealed the first image of the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The image was produced by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, an international team made up of over 300 scientists on five continents – including Africa. Black holes were predicted by Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity over a … Read More
