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.
The CARTA development team is excited to announce that CARTA v2.0 is released today! The development team has tried hard to elevate CARTA to a higher level over the last six months by adding important new features. In addition to the feature development, we also spent a significant amount of time refactoring the codebase so that it is more maintainable … Read More
The Galactic interstellar medium hosts a significant magnetic field, which can be probed through the synchrotron emission produced from its interaction with relativistic electrons. Linearly polarized synchrotron emission is generated throughout the Galaxy, and at longer wavelengths, modified along nearly every path by Faraday rotation in the intervening magneto-ionic medium. Full characterization of the polarized emission requires wideband observations with … Read More
In an issue packed with retrospectives and news from UWC’s 60th Anniversary year in 2020, IDIA’s language project with the UWC Xhosa department to translate Astronomy resources into isiXhosa get an honourable mention. We also congratulate our Senior research Prof. Mario Santos for his NRF A-rating, a great achievement. Finally, there is also mention of our colleagues from Bioinformatics, and … Read More
The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project (HELP) collates, curates, homogenises, and creates derived data products for most of the premium multi-wavelength extragalactic data sets. This is not an easy task, as each telescope used to collect data uses different resolutions, different types of light – wavelengths – and observes different types of objects. Some are point-like sources of light, others are … 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
The IDIA Vislab team has published a paper on their immersive visualisation work. They describe a software package they are busy developing: The iDaVIE software suite currently under development reads from both “volumetric data cubes” and “sparse multi-dimensional catalogs”, rendering them in a room-scale immersive environment that allows the user to intuitively view, navigate around and interact with features in … Read More
