DEADLINE: 6 June 2022 The Centre for Radio Cosmology (CRC) at UWC is internationally recognised for its research in cosmology and galaxy evolution with MeerKAT, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and other telescopes (see astro.uwc.ac.za for further details). In 2022, the CRC research team includes 21 PhD/ MSc students and 11postdoctoral fellows. Postgraduate students at the CRC work in a friendly and highly active …
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 …
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 …
The Centre for Radio Cosmology (CRC) at UWC is internationally recognised for its research in cosmology using MeerKAT and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). CRC faculty are involved in other MeerKAT and SKA key science, as well as in HERA, HIRAX and the Rubin Observatory (LSST). In 2021, the UWC Astro Group consists of 25 …
The award was announced during UWC’s Annual Research Recognition Awards and presented by the DVC Research and Innovation, Prof. Jozé Frantz. Mogamad-Junaid competed his MSc Summa Cum Laude within 2 years of enrolling. His hope is to go on and pursue a career as a cosmologist, studying the history and evolution of the universe, while …
Recently, the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) collaboration has produced the experiment’s first upper limits on the power spectrum of 21-cm fluctuations at z~8 and 10. Here, we use several independent theoretical models to infer constraints on the intergalactic medium (IGM) and galaxies during the epoch of reionization (EoR) from these limits. We find …
Over the past decade, rest-frame color-color diagrams have become popular tools for selecting quiescent galaxies at high redshift, breaking the color degeneracy between quiescent and dust-reddened star-forming galaxies. In this work, we study one such color-color selection tool — the rest-frame U−V vs. V−J diagram — by employing mock observations of cosmological galaxy formation simulations. In particular, we conduct …
We apply for the first time Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) as a foreground removal technique in the context of single-dish, low redshift HI intensity mapping, and present an open-source python toolkit for doing so. We use MeerKAT and SKA1-MID-like simulations of 21cm foregrounds (including polarisation leakage), HI cosmological signal and instrumental noise. We find that …
Astrophysics student Nicole Thomas, who is completing her PhD at the University of the Western Cape’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, was selected to attend the 69th Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany, in 2019. Nicole, one of our students, is interviewed in UWC’s latest 360º Perspectives Magazine (p.24-25) – a big issue packed with retrospectives and …
In the context of forthcoming galaxy surveys, to ensure unbiased constraints on cosmology and gravity when using non-linear structure information, percent-level accuracy is required when modelling the power spectrum. This calls for frameworks that can accurately capture the relevant physical effects, while allowing for deviations from ΛCDM. Massive neutrino and baryonic physics are two of the …
