COMPARE THE MHONGOOSE
ASTRON’s De Blok is one of the astronomers sifting through MeerKAT’s staggering amount of data. He leads the MHONGOOSE project, raising the naming stakes for astronomy acronyms. MHONGOOSE – which stands for MeerKAT Hydrogen (actually, a very specific form of atomic hydrogen) Observations of Nearby Galactic Objects – Observing Southern Emitters – will survey thirty galaxies to understand how they form and evolve. Alongside MHONGOOSE, the telescope has other equally well-named surveys: ‘LADUMA’ (aka Looking at the Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array) is what football fans in South Africa shout when someone
scores a goal; the namers of ‘MIGHTEE’ (MeerKAT International Gigahertz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration) are obviously setting their survey up for greatness or, at the very least, exciting press releases; and then there’s ThunderKAT (The Hunt for Dynamic and Explosive Radio Transients with MeerKAT) – which might just be the best name of all. For many of these surveys, detecting hydrogen is vital. Hydrogen is a basic building block of stars, and galaxies need hydrogen to fuel star formation. This makes hydrogen hunting central to the MHONGOOSE project. While hydrogen is essential, there does not appear to be enough of it inside galaxies to sustain them. De Blok’s project will track hydrogen’s distinctive radio signal in nearby galaxies to investigate the paradox in these cosmic systems.
“MeerKAT produces about 2.5 terabytes of data per hour, which is more than 500 DVDs.” The SKA is also likely to radically change our understanding of the universe. But, just like those working on that other grand scientific project, the James Webb Space Telescope (see page XXX), scientists will have to be patient. ‘Construction is going to take a while, and, until then, there’s a lot of science to be done with MeerKAT,’ says Adrian Tiplady, Deputy Managing Director of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory. ‘Already, its scientific output is having a significant impact on new discoveries and we’re just scratching the surface.’ It took scientists three years to trawl through the data that yielded the latest
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THE YEA R IN SPACE
image of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, and that is a taste of the challenges to come for SKA radio astronomers. Gone are the days of noticing an interesting object in an image, picking up the phone, and telling everyone about it – although that may have only ever happened in movies. In modern astronomy, particularly radio astronomy, observations require trawling through rivers of data and patience. Lots of patience. MeerKAT produces about 2.5 terabytes of data per hour, which is more than 500 DVDs. But that is a drop in the ocean compared to the deluge that the SKA will bring. Every year, the volume of data will fill the equivalent of over a million 500GB hard drives.
OPPOSITE: Threads of radio emissions, detected by MeerKAT, link different parts of the ESO 137-006 galaxy. The galaxy is about 250 million light years away. South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) ABOVE: An artist’s representation of the MeerKAT and the radio signals it can detect. South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO)
THE SO NG O F THE U NIVE RSE
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