Research Projects

NEW DATA RELEASE! Unveiling the Deep Radio Sky with the superMIGHTEE Project

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A major milestone has been reached with the first data release from the superMIGHTEE project, combining observations from the MIGHTEE Survey using South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope and India’s upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT). This telescope combination offers the most sensitive and scientifically powerful images of deep-sky radio emission before the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) becomes operational. The new dataset … Read More

PRESS RELEASE! Early star-forming galaxies at cosmic noon were highly magnetized and too windy (engulfed by halos of high-energy cosmic rays)

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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

SOFTWARE RELEASE! CARTA release v5.0

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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

SOFTWARE RELEASE! CARTA v5-beta

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A new release of CARTA is out: v5-beta. This contains several new major features, along with bug fixes and enhancements. The new features include a channel map view and an RGB colour blender. CARTA is a major visualisation tool used by thousands of astronomers worldwide, architected for use with big data sets. In its current form, CARTA has been under development since the start of 2018 … 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

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

CARTA 3.0 Released

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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

African scientists and technology could drive future black hole discoveries

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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

Are galaxies spinning in alignment with the cosmic web?

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A new paper by the MIGHTEE-HI team reveals the connection between the direction of spin of galaxies and underlying large scale web of structure fund in the universe. Using a sample of 77 galaxies that are also known from other observations, the scientists calculated the axis around which the galaxies are spinning. If the background intergalactic distribution of matter (ordinary … Read More

Megamaser “Nkalakatha” discovered by astronomers using MeerKAT

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Using the MeerKAT radio telescope, a team of researchers from the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town, Rhodes University, the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory and the South African Astronomical Observatory together with colleagues from twelve other countries have discovered a powerful megamaser – a radio-wavelength laser indicative of colliding galaxies. This is the most distant … Read More