E-Paper
First data from MALS project released
The vast expanse of the observable universe is home to countless galaxies. Many of these galaxies have supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which become active when gas infalling towards the black hole results in release of large amounts of energy
Pune
A catalog of a large number (4,95,325) of radio sources in the Universe has been released under the MeerKAT Absorption Line Survey (MALS) - a project led by prof Neeraj Gupta from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA). Many of these contain supermassive black holes and have been observed for the first time by anyone.
The vast expanse of the observable universe is home to countless galaxies. Many of these galaxies have supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which become active when gas infalling towards the black hole results in release of large amounts of energy. The energy output from these Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), often outshines the light from the entire galaxy. Additionally, they eject jets- collimated streams of highly-energetic ionized gas particles, piercing through the interstellar medium (ISM) amid the stars.
“The interplay between energetic output from AGN and cold gas in host galaxies is central to understanding the fueling of massive black holes and the evolution of galaxies hosting these. MALS is carrying out a sensitive search of absorption lines to characterize the properties of cold atomic and molecular gas associated with AGN,” said prof Gupta.
The MALS team has released radio continuum images and a catalog of 4,95,325 radio sources detected over an area of 2289 deg2 from 391 telescope pointings at 1-1.4 GHz.
“Majority of these radio sources are AGNs and many are detected for the first time, thanks to excellent capabilities of MeerKAT. These radio sources will subsequently be used as background targets to detect signatures of cold gas in and around galaxies, addressing the main theme of the survey.” said Partha Pratim Deka, currently a PhD student at IUCAA, Pune and the lead-author of the Astrophysical Journal article describing the data release.
This is the first of several radio continuum and spectral line data releases to come from MALS. Making this data release has been a team effort. The MALS team is an international collaboration of researchers from around the world. The project is led by Prof Niraj Gupta from IUCAA, India.
“The MeerKAT telescope is a facility of the National Research Foundation (NRF) in South Africa and is operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO). The huge volume of raw survey data (1.6 petabytes) received from SARAO are hosted and processed at IUCAA using an automated pipeline built at IUCAA in collaboration with Thoughtworks Technologies India Pvt. Ltd. It extensively utilizes tools and tasks from the Common Astronomy Software Applications (CASA) software built by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) of the USA,” said prof Gupta.
