Cross-matching Rubin and MeerKAT surveys

Project information

Project leads: Matt Hilton (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)

Point of contact: Matt Hilton (matt.hilton@wits.ac.za)

Rubin project code: SZA-SAA-S2

Relevant working groups:

Project status: Active

Rationale

South Africa's MeerKAT instrument provides wide field (> 1.5 degree diameter) imaging and spectroscopy in the L (900 - 1670 MHz) and UHF (580 - 1015 MHz) bands, in the sky accessible to Rubin Observatory. Radio continuum observations provide information on galaxy star formation rates that are not subject to dust extinction, as well as information on the timing of feedback events (through spectral index measurements), and the properties of AGN. MeerKAT is also revolutionizing our view of diffuse emission, such as radio lobes associated with AGNs, and phenomena like radio relics and halos seen in galaxy clusters, thanks to its dense core with many short baselines.

We will provide imaging and catalogs derived from public MeerKAT data, and associated services (e.g., cutouts, overlays, and cross matching with LSST data), which will ultimately be integrated into the Rubin Science Platform and hosted at NOIRLab. This is in support of activities by the Galaxies Science Collaboration - please contact us if you have any requests for MeerKAT data processing that can help with your project.

As an illustration of the potential usefulness of mining public MeerKAT data, the plot below shows the contents of the public MeerKAT archive over much of the LSST footprint, as of November 2022. MeerKAT will continue taking observations until at least 2027, when it will begin to be integrated into the Square Kilometre Array.

Contents of the MeerKAT archive over much of the sky area that will be covered by Rubin Observatory. The cyan points indicate observations that are public, as of November 2022. The yellow points show the positions of observations by the MeerKAT Absorption Line Survey which are not yet public. Both the cyan and yellow points cover the 1.5 degree-wide field of an L-band MeerKAT observation. The background image is the Planck 353 GHz map, which highlights dust emission from the galaxy. The red shaded area is the nominal galaxy cluster search area from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope Data Release 5.

Results

Talks and presentations

February 2023: "Rubin x MeerKAT: what new generation radio observations can do for LSST" (talk slides from presentation on Galaxies SC telecon, 2023-02-15)

Outputs