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 …
Using a sample of 67 galaxies from the MIGHTEE Survey Early Science data we study the HI-based baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (bTFr), covering a period of ∼one billion years (0≤z≤0.081). We consider the bTFr based on two different rotational velocity measures: the width of the global HI profile and Vout, measured as the outermost rotational velocity from the …
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 – …
In this third paper of a series describing direction dependent corrections for polarimetric radio imaging, we present the the A-to-Z solver methodology to model the full Jones antenna aperture illumination pattern (AIP) with Zernike polynomials. In order to achieve thermal noise limited imaging with modern radio interferometers, it is necessary to correct for the instrumental …
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. …
The International Astronomical Union recently held its elections for members to lead the various scientific bodies organised as divisions and commissions. UWC Astronomy members Carolina Odman (IDIA) and Lucia Marchetti (former postdoc, now at UCT) were elected to Commission C2 “Communicating Astronomy to the Public” and Division J “Galaxies and Cosmology” respectively. We congratulate them …
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 …
The Centre for Radio Cosmology (CRC) at UWC is internationally recognised for its research in cosmology using MeerKAT, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and other radio and optical/IR telescopes. CRC faculty are involved in MeerKAT and SKA key science, as well as in HERA, HIRAX and the Rubin Observatory (LSST). In 2021, the UWC Astro …
We present the Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project (HELP). This project collates, curates, homogenises, and creates derived data products for most of the premium multi-wavelength extragalactic data sets. The sky boundaries for the first data release cover 1270 deg2 defined by the Herschel SPIRE extragalactic survey fields; notably the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES) and the …
