Research

HELP: The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project

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 …

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Lenses In VoicE (LIVE): Searching for strong gravitational lenses in the VOICE@VST survey using Convolutional Neural Networks

We present a sample of 16 likely strong gravitational lenses identified in the VST Optical Imaging of the CDFS and ES1 fields (VOICE survey) using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We train two different CNNs on composite images produced by superimposing simulated gravitational arcs on real Luminous Red Galaxies observed in VOICE. Specifically, the first CNN …

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NSTF “Science Oscars” Will Recognise SA’s Finest – And The UWC Nominees Are…

The National Science and Technology Forum awards were established decades ago to recognise outstanding contributions to science. The University of the Western Cape (UWC) is once again playing its part, with three top UWC scientists being nominated for the 2020/2021 NSTF-South32 Awards. “We are living in interesting and unprecedented times,” said Professor Michael-Davies-Coleman, Dean of UWC’s Faculty …

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Multi-tasking the growth of cosmological structures

A new preprint by Louis Perenon, Matteo Martinelli, Stéphane Ilić, Roy Maartens, Michelle Lochner and Chris Clarkson has been posted on the arXiv. Read the abstract below. Next-generation large-scale structure surveys will deliver a significant increase in the precision of growth data, allowing us to use `agnostic’ methods to study the evolution of perturbations without …

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RADIOSKY2020 Italy-South Africa Research Programme (ISARP) Virtual Workshop (18 June 2020)

The University of the Western Cape (UWC)/Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA), Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF-IRA), and the Italian Embassy hosted the RADIOSKY2020 Workshop virtually on 18 June 2020. Find here a summary about the event https://www.idia.ac.za/radiosky2020-italy-south-africa-research-programme-isarp-virtual-workshop and here most presentations https://www.idia.ac.za/radiosky-2020-workshop/ Image Credit: Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, generated by …

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