Colloquium Abstract - Gupta - 2024Nov08

November 8, 2024

11:00am Mountain

Neeraj Gupta (IUCAA)

 

The MeerKAT Absorption Line Survey (MALS) view of cold gas in and around galaxies

 

Abstract

The MeerKAT Absorption Line Survey (MALS; https://mals.iucaa.in/ ) consists of 1655 hrs (1.5 PB raw visibilities) on the MeerKAT Radio Telescope to carry out the most sensitive blind HI 21-cm and OH 18-cm absorption line survey. Due to the excellent sensitivity, the large field-of-view and wideband coverage (580 - 1670 MHz), the ~400 pointings of the survey are also delivering an extremely competitive HI 21-cm emission line ( several 1000 galaxies) and deep radio continuum (~million sources) data and science . Through these, we have recently reported: (i) the detection of the most luminous known extragalactic 1720 MHz OH maser line, (ii) the discovery of the first extragalactic Hydrogen radio recombination line at cosmological distances, and (iii) the first two public data releases comprising a million radio continuum sources leading to a measurement of the cosmic radio dipole. In this talk, I will present (i) an overview of the survey, (ii) key results, with focus on occurrence of cold atomic and molecular gas in and around the Milky Way and external galaxies (0<z<0.5), (iii) technical challenges and (iv) the public data release plan.


Local Host: Emmanuel Momjian

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