Details on the event

01/09/2018

Astrophysics Talk

Looking At the Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array LADUMA

Benne Holwerda (University of Louisville)

Tuesday 22/12/2020 @ 14:00, Sala IV piano Battiferro

The MeerKAT (64 x 13.5m dish radio interferometer) is South Africa's precursor instrument for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), exploring dish design, instrumentation, and the characteristics of a Karoo desert site and is projected to be on sky in 2016. One of two top-priority, Key Projects is a single deep field, integrating for ~5000 hours total with the aim to detect neutral atomic hydrogen through its 21 cm line emission out to redshift unity and beyond. This first truly deep HI survey will help constrain fueling models for galaxy assembly and evolution. It will measure the evolution of the cosmic neutral gas density and its distribution over galaxies over cosmic time, explore evolution of the gas in galaxies, measure the Tully-Fisher relation, measure OH maser counts, and address many more topics. Here I present the observing strategy and envisaged science case for this unique deep field, which encompasses the Chandra Deep Field-South, an LSST deep drilling field and several other surveys, to produce a singular legacy multi-wavelength data-set. MeerKAT is commissioning line observations now and is expected to produce the first LADUMA data by next summer.

Download the slides (pdf)