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
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
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
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
