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    MeerKAT tagged posts

    Webb explores effect of strong magnetic fields on star formation

    April 4, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The MeerKAT radio telescope shows the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, with a graphic pullout highlighting a much smaller region on the right, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared light observations. The MeerKAT image is colored in blue, cyan, and yellow, with a very bright white-yellow center that indicates the location of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole. Painterly bubbles of various sizes, clouds, and vertical brushstroke-like streaks make up the radio image. The Webb inset shows stars and gas clouds in red, with an arching cloud of bright cyan that contains many straight, needle-like features that appear more crystalline than cloudy.
    An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT (formerly the Karoo Array Telescope) radio telescope array puts the James Webb Space Telescope’s image of the Sagittarius C region in context. Like a super-long exposure photograph, MeerKAT shows the bubble-like remnants of supernovas that exploded over millennia, capturing the dynamic nature of the Milky Way’s chaotic core. At the center of the MeerKAT image the region surrounding the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole blazes bright. Huge vertical filamentary structures echo those captured on a smaller scale by Webb in Sagittarius C’s blue-green hydrogen cloud.
    NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford)

    Follow-up research on a 2023 image of the Sagittarius ...

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    Astronomers Discover 49 New Galaxies in Under Three Hours

    March 27, 2024, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Four nearby galaxies as part of the set of 49 found by MeerKAT, shown by the white contours. Three of the galaxies are connected together by their gas content. The largest galaxy is stealing gas from two neighbouring galaxies. The background colour image is from the DECaLS DR10 optical survey. Glowacki et al. 2024

    Dr. Marcin Glowacki, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Western Australia, led the research, which aimed to study the star-forming gas in a single radio galaxy.

    Although the team didn’t find any star-forming gas in the galaxy they were studying, Dr. Glowacki instead discovered other galaxies while inspecting the data.

    In total, the gas of 49 galaxies was detected. Dr Glowacki said this was a great example of how fantastic an instrument like MeerKAT is for finding the star-forming gas in galaxies.

    “I did not expect to find almost fifty new galaxies in such a short time,” he said.

    “By implementing different techniques for finding galaxies, which are used for other MeerKAT surveys, we were able to detect all...

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    Lightest Black Hole or Heaviest Neutron Star? MeerKAT Uncovers a Mysterious Object in Milky Way

    January 23, 2024, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    An artist’s impression of the system assuming that the massive companion star is a black hole. The brightest background star is its orbital companion, the radio pulsar PSR J0514-4002E. The two stars are separated by 8 million km and circle each other every 7 days.
    Credit: Daniëlle Futselaar (artsource.nl)

    An international team of astronomers have found a new and unknown object in the Milky Way that is heavier than the heaviest neutron stars known and yet simultaneously lighter than the lightest black holes known.

    Using the MeerKAT Radio Telescope, astronomers from a number of institutions including The University of Manchester and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany found an object in orbit around a rapidly spinning millisecond pulsar located around 40,000 ligh...

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    Telescope dons ‘Sunglasses’ to find Brightest-ever Pulsar

    May 3, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Dishes of the ASKAP radio telescope stretch towards the horizon beneath a dawn sky ©  CSIRO

    An international research team, including scientists at Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, has used a new observation technique to discover the brightest extragalactic pulsar known, and it could even be the most luminous one ever found.

    First discovered in 1967, pulsars are remnants of massive stars and offer researchers potential applications in areas like random number generation and guidance systems for spacecraft.

    The research team used the ASKAP radio telescope, owned and operated by CSIRO, to apply a new method of seeking out pulsars...

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