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The European Astronomical Society virtual meeting EAS 2021 will hold a Special Session on 28 June – SS5 Data-intensive radio astronomy: bringing astrophysics to the exabyte era. It will feature UWC’s eResearch Director Mattia Vaccari, a member of the organising committee.

The session will cover the current status and challenges faced by radio astronomy in handling large data volumes, and technical solutions and applications within and outside astronomy.

The aim of the session is to bring together different communities (astrophysics, high-energy physics, research institutes, industry) to discuss current tools and ideas for the future development of data management. The meeting hopes to enhance the broader knowledge base through various approaches to tackling the challenges SKA radio telescopes are facing, now and in the future.

The topics that will be covered include
Data-intensive radio astronomy, current facilities and challenges;
Data science and the exa-scale era: technical solutions within astronomy;
Data science and the exa-scale era: applications and challenges outside astronomy.

Scientific Organising Committee – Special Session 5 EAS2021

chair – Eleni Vardoulaki (TLS, Germany)
co-chair – Marta Dembska (DLR, Germany)
co-chair – Alexander Drabent (TLS, Germany)

Mattia Vaccari (UWC, South Africa)
Roberto Pizzo (ASTRON, Netherlands)
Hans-Rainer Kloeckner (MPIfR, Germany)
Giuliano Taffoni (INAF, Italy)
Matthias Hoeft (TLS, Germany)

Find out more about EAS 2021 European Astronomical Society Annual Meeting 2021

The deadline for abstract submission is 2 March 2021. Researchers can submit abstracts here. The organising group will accept oral and poster presentations. Please also note that the same deadline applies for applications for fee waivers.

SS5 Data-intensive radio astronomy: bringing astrophysics to the exabyte era will be an afternoon session at CET (Central European time) on 28 June.

The SKA Observatory (SKAO) is an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to radio astronomy and was launched on 4 February following its first council meeting. SKAO is tasked with “building and operating the two largest and most complex radio telescope networks ever conceived to address fundamental questions about our universe”.

SKAO has headquarters in the UK, and sites in South Africa and Australia. It is the world’s second inter-governmental organisation that is solely dedicated to astronomy, and other members include Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal. Observers include France, Germany, India, Spain and Sweden. SKAO will begin recruitment in Australia and South Africa in the next few months, working alongside local partners CSIRO and SARAO to supervise construction, which is expected to last eight years, with early science opportunities starting in the mid 2020s.

South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope, currently operated by SARAO (South African Radio Astronomy Observatory), will become part (and make up approximately 25%) of the SKA1-Mid telescope or Phase 1 of the SKA mid-frequency telescope.

MeerKAT, situated in the Karoo, consists of a 64 dish-shaped antennas. It is an SKA precursor or ‘pathfinder’ telescope, and is the most powerful radio telescope in the southern hemisphere. The MeerKAT antennas, each 13.5 metres in diameter and standing about four stories high, are distributed over 8 km and are connected by buried power lines and optical fibre connections to very fast computers in the underground Karoo Array Processor Building (KAPB) on the Losberg site.

Find out more from SKA and SKA Observatory.

Image: Nighttime composite image of the SKA combining all elements in South Africa and Australia. Credit: SKAO, ICRAR, SARAO / Acknowledgment: The GLEAM view of the centre of the Milky Way, in radio colour. Credit: Natasha Hurley-Walker (Curtin / ICRAR) and the GLEAM Team.

Astronomers from UWC are part of an international team responsible for the remarkable discovery of two giant radio galaxies. These galaxies were spotted in new radio maps of the sky created by the MeerKAT International Gigahertz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration (MIGHTEE) survey. It is one of the largest survey projects underway with South Africa’s impressive MeerKAT radio telescope and serves as a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) due to become fully operational in the mid-2020s.

Dr Matthew Prescott, second author on the paper, is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with UWC’s Astrophysics Group . Read an interview with him about his work. UWC eResearch Director Prof Mattia Vaccari and several other UWC researchers are also co-authors.

The discovery has made waves in the astronomical community around the world. Read articles from CNN, SciNews, Phys.org and Tech Times to find out more.

Image: The giant radio galaxy MGTC J095959.63+024608.6; in the background is the sky as seen in optical light; overlaid in red is the radio light from the giant radio galaxy, as seen by MeerKAT. Image credit: I. Heywood, University of Oxford / Rhodes University / South African Radio Astronomy Observatory / CC BY 4.0.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation continues to work with the public and private sectors in the global response to COVID-19.

The International COVID-19 Data Alliance (ICODA) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges initiative, supported by the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, are announcing an open funding call for research studies to accelerate knowledge of COVID-19 through data science: Grand Challenges ICODA COVID-19 Data Science. Register for an informational workshop to be held on January 7, 2021 (14:00 UTC), and the grant application deadline is January 19, 2021

Researchers can register for an  informational workshop to be held on January 7, 2021 (14:00 UTC), and the grant application deadline is January 19, 2021.

“We invite you to read summaries of the grants awarded to date through Grand Challenges initiatives with the Gates Foundation as funder or co-funder and to explore an interactive world map of projects across the broader Grand Challenges funding partner network.If you have a great idea for one of the open opportunities, please apply. If you know someone else who has a great idea, please forward this message so they can apply and sign up on our Grand Challenges website for email updates with the latest opportunities. We look forward to receiving innovative ideas from around the world.”

To learn more about the foundation’s broader work and how COVID-19 is being addressed across the foundation, visit the foundation’s website and sign-up for The Optimist newsletter. See videos of the plenary sessions at the 2020 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting, for the first time in virtual format and with a focus on addressing the current pandemic and using partnerships and lessons learned to speed progress across a broad range of global health and development goals.