South Africa’s MeerKAT discovers 20 galaxies

Posted on 14 July 2021

The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (Sarao) has announced that a group of 20 galaxies has been discovered with the MeerKAT telescope.

South Africa's MeerKAT discovers 20 galaxies

This large galaxy resides in a very well-studied area of the sky, but this is the very first time it has ever been identified and it may be the most neutral hydrogen gas-rich group ever discovered, reported TechCentral.

Most star-forming galaxies are submerged within a cloud of cold neutral hydrogen gas which can only be detected in radio wavelengths and acts as the raw fuel which stars can eventually form.

Sarao believes that this group of galaxies is still in the process of assembly and has not undergone processes that will remove the neutral hydrogen gas.

The paper on the discovery was led by Shilpa Ranchop, an MSc student, and supervised by Prof Roger Deane and the University of Pretoria.

‘The distribution of neutral hydrogen gas in these galaxies has revealed interesting, disturbed morphologies suggesting that these galaxies are group members, and are being influenced by their cosmic neighbours in the group. For example, we found an interacting pair of galaxies that will potentially merge to form a new galaxy with a completely transformed appearance,’ Ranchop said.

This galaxy group was discovered by the MeerKAT International Gigahertz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration (Mightee) survey which is one of the large survey projects in progress with South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope and consists of a team of South African and international astronomers.

The MeerKAT radio telescope in the Northern Cape, South Africa’s precursor to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), aims to answer fundamental questions about the formation and evolution of galaxies. Its exceptional sensitivity provides astronomers with further insight into the drivers of galaxy evolution.

Natasha Maddox is a research scientist at Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich, and co-chair of the Mightee neutral hydrogen working group.

Maddox revealed that this galaxy exists in an area of the sky that has been studied multiple times with other telescopes but has only been discovered by the MeerKAT.

‘MeerKAT is an important step in the direction of the SKA – providing us with a view to future SKA science projects and lessons on how to overcome the many technical challenges involved in realising the true scientific potential of SKA and SKA pathfinder,’ said Bradley Frank, who is Sarao’s associate director of astronomy operations at the Inter-university Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy and co-chair of the Mightee neutral hydrogen working group.

‘This discovery shows that our MeerKAT observations caught a galaxy group in the early stages of its assembly, which is very uncommon. Therefore, this discovery is not only important per se, but will set new grounds for the understanding of how galaxies are assembled into groups and transformed by their environment. We expect many wonderful findings like this in the future, thanks to the ongoing MeerKAT surveys,’ said Anastasia Ponomareva, a researcher at the University of Oxford and co-author of the paper.

PICTURE: Flickr

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