Working in partnership with IDIA, astronomers involved in the LADUMA (Looking At the Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array) project have discovered a powerful, energetic “megamaser” source in a galaxy almost five billion light years away from Earth. The LADUMA team is seeking a nickname for this source in one of South Africa’s eleven official languages, or in one of … Read More
CARTA forges ahead with a new beta release. As there is now a stable codebase, the CARTA team is confident to release beta versions for astronomers to use. The beta server (https://carta-beta.idia.ac.za) has now been upgraded to the latest public beta release (v3.0.0-beta1). Highlights of this release include: A new multi-panel view, which allows multiple images to be viewed side by side. Click the cog button in … Read More
Using early science data for the MIGHTEE project on the MeerKAT radio telescope, a researcher at the University of the Western Cape – with collaborators from eight countries, including four other South African Institutions – has analysed over 2000 galaxies, growing our understanding of the evolution of galaxies over cosmic time. Dr Fangxia An – a postdoctoral researcher at IDIA … Read More
Radio telescopes are very complex instruments. Unlike telescopes using mirrors that measure visible or infra-red light, most modern radio telescopes are made of many antennae, each acting like a pixel. Combining the signals of each of the antennae, like the 64 dishes of the MeerKAT telescope is very complex and adding them into what is called the “primary beam”, is … Read More
When the science world decided to embark on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, serendipitous discovery – essentially chance findings – was boldly cited as a scientific goal. The MeerKAT telescope is already proving this bet right, as new, previously unidentified galaxies were discovered by the MIGHTEE project team in a well-studied area in the sky. That area, called XMM-LSS … Read More
Prof. Carolina Odman contributed a piece to celebrate Africa Science Renaissance Day on 30 June 2021. Read it below: On 30 June each year, the African Union celebrates the day of Africa’s Science Renaissance, and it is worth celebrating. African science is among the oldest known to man. The university at Timbuktu, founded around 1 800 years ago, served as an intellectual hub … Read More
CARTA, the visualisation software that is developed by IDIA and partners from the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the Department of Physics, University of Alberta. CARTA has been nominated by one of its users for the ADASS Prize “An oustanding contribution to astronomical software“. ADASS stands for Astronomical Data Analysis … Read More
The International Astronomical Union recently held its elections for members to lead the various scientific bodies organised as divisions and commissions. IDIA members Patrick Woudt, Lucia Marchetti and Carolina Odman were elected to the vice-presidence of Commission B4 “Radio Astronomy”, Division J “Galaxies and Cosmology” and Commission C2 “Communicating Astronomy to the Public”. We congratulate them on their election and … Read More
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
We have put together a short IDIA Highlights Brochure for June 2021. IDIA activities are multiple and diverse. In this brochure, we highlight just a few of them, in view of a more substantial activity report later in the year. In the meantime, grab yours here, and feel free to contact us at communications@idia.ac.za for any feedback or suggestions.
