Dr. Sarah Blyth, a lecturer in the Department of Astronomy at UCT, will give a free public lecture at S.A. Astronomical Observatory in Cape Town on Saturday, February 11 at 20h00. The title of her talk is "Evolution of Galaxies: What the MeerKAT can tell us".  After the talk, there will be stargazing and tours of the site.  Meerkat is currently being built in the arid Karoo region of South Africa and will be the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere until the completion of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in 2024.  In addition to the valuable science MeerKAT will be doing, it also serves as a stepping stone for the development and testing of the technologies that SKA will require.

Evolution of Galaxies: What the MeerKAT can tell us
Some big unanswered questions in extragalactic astronomy are "How do galaxies form?" and "How did they get to look the way we see them today?". Astronomers hope to answer some of these questions of galaxy formation and evolution by studying the neutral hydrogen gas which is a significant component of galaxy structure. The next generation of radio telescopes such as the MeerKAT, which is currently being built in the Northern Cape, and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will enable us to study the neutral hydrogen in far away galaxies, allowing us to trace its evolution over cosmic time.