On April 8, 2022, we are glad to welcome Mr. Jonathan Freese from the Western Cape Education Department. Mr. Freese is Deputy Chief Education Specialist: Technology Senior Phase and WCED Coding and Robotics Coordinator. His talk, entitled “Past, Present and Future Perspective of the African 21st Century Science and Technology” will describe some of the work he is doing, among … Read More
Astronomy’s newest mystery objects, odd radio circles or ORCs, have been pulled into sharp focus by an international team of astronomers using the world’s most capable radio telescopes. Cape Town – 22 March 2022 First revealed by the ASKAP radio telescope, owned and operated by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO, odd radio circles quickly became objects of fascination. Theories on … Read More
The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) has released today a new MeerKAT telescope image of the centre of our Galaxy, showing radio emission from the region with unprecedented clarity and depth. The international team behind the work is publishing the initial science highlights from this image in The Astrophysical Journal. The article is accompanied by a public release of the data to … Read More
UPDATE: This position is now filled. IDIA seeks to appoint a Data Scientist to work on the BRICS Intelligent Telescope and Data Network (BITDN), and the IDIA hackathon programme. The BITDN is a BRICS flagship programme in astronomy to develop a telescope and data network. It will draw on the opportunities presented by multi-wavelength space- and ground-based facilities that are … Read More
Galaxy formation and evolution is a fascinating topic. Astronomers don’t know exactly how galaxies form. Large galaxies are often home to hundreds of billions of stars, but when a mega galaxy is observed at a fraction of the age of the universe, astronomers still wonder how it is possible that such mega structures form in such a short amount of … Read More
An international team led by astronomers Gyula Józsa, Michelle Cluver, and Thomas Jarrett has utilized the South African MeerKAT telescope to discover a mysterious chain of hydrogen gas clouds the size of a massive galaxy. Indeed, the accumulation of so much elemental hydrogen without associated stellar components is the largest yet discovered. Appearing at the edge of a relatively massive … Read More
An international team led by a young South African researcher has just announced a comprehensive overview paper for the MeerKAT Galaxy Cluster Legacy Survey (MGCLS). The paper to be published in the Astronomy & Astrophysicsjournal presents some exciting, novel results, and is accompanied by the public release of a huge trove of curated data now available for astronomers worldwide to address … Read More
In the context of the 2021 Indaba X Roadshow, a panel discussion will be held at the University of Pretoria on the new and powerful collaborative aspects of modern scientific research, especially in relation to Machine Learning and Aritifcial Intelligence. IDIA Senior Researcher and Senior Lecturer in Physics Dr. Kshitij Thorat is joining the panel discussion that will take place … Read More
Scientists across all disciplines increasingly rely on machine learning algorithms to analyse and sort datasets of ever increasing volume and complexity. These algorithms are great at extracting trends and outliers, and automate the data analysis process to a great extent, but science being also about not missing the unexpected, scientists still need to be able to closely inspect their data … Read More
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 MIGHTEE. It is a galaxy … Read More
