Hosted by Dr. Jacinta Delhaize & Dr. Daniel Cunnama.

A powerful, naturally occurring “space laser”, called a megamaser, has been discovered with South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope in a galaxy nearly five billion light-years away. This is the most distant such megamaser found so far, and was probably forged in the collision of two galaxies. The megamaser has been nicknamed “Nkalakatha,” meaning “big boss” in isiZulu.

 

A maser is just like a laser but in radio waves instead of visible light. When galaxies (like our own Milky Way) collide, this can create extremely bright masers, called megamasers. The maser light comes from hydroxyl molecules inside extremely dense clouds of interstellar gas.

 

We are joined by Associate Professor Sarah Blyth from the University of Cape Town who is one of the principal investigators for the LADUMA survey. The Looking at the Distant Universe with the Meerkat Array (LADUMA) team leads one of the big MeerKAT science experiments, which is looking for neutral hydrogen gas in galaxies in one area of the sky, and looking for it very deeply.

 

We also speak with the lead researcher Dr. Marcin Glowacki, previously a researcher at the Inter-University Institute for Data-Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) and University of the Western Cape, and now based at the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

 

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