Daily Image
02-11-2010
MeerKAT time for a Fornax HI survey!
| Submitter: | Paolo Serra |
| Description: | On the way to the Square Kilometre Array, a number of radio telescopes are being built or upgraded around the world. One of these is MeerKAT, the South African SKA precursor to be constructed in the Karoo desert. MeerKAT will be an array of 64 x 13.5m effective diameter offset Gregorian dishes fitted with wide-band single-pixel cryogenic receivers. Recently, time has been allocated for ten large surveys using MeerKAT. Astron features prominently in the approved survey teams. It hosts the leaders of two of the surveys, and a total of six projects include Astron co-investigators. One of the approved projects is a deep HI survey of the Fornax cluster, lead by Paolo Serra and involving Gyula Jozsa, Roberto Pizzo and Tom Oosterloo from Astron, as well investigators from Groningen, New York and Cape Town. The project was allocated 2,450 hours of observing time to cover a 11 degree2 area around the Fornax cluster. The survey will cover a wide range of galaxy environment density, ranging from the cluster centre to its gas-rich outskirts where infalling groups are found. The high sensitivity of these observations will provide an excellent opportunity to study the assembly of clusters, the physics of the accretion and stripping of gas in galaxies falling in the cluster, and to probe for the first time the connection between these processes and the neutral medium in the cosmic web. For more information on the approved MeerKAT surveys see http://www.ska.ac.za/releases/20101022.php . |
| Copyright: | MeerKAT artist impression by Jeroen de Boer. Background Fornax image by ESO / J.Emerson / VISTA. |
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