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. The name was suggested by UWC student Zolile Tibane.
A maser is like a laser but in radio waves instead of visible light. When galaxies collide, this can create extremely bright masers, called megamasers. The maser light comes from hydroxyl molecules inside extremely dense clouds of interstellar gas.
Hydroxyl molecules are also referred to as OH, because they are each made of one atom of oxygen and one atom of hydrogen. OH masers emit a specific radio signal with a wavelength of 18cm.
South Africa’s world-leading radio telescope, MeerKAT, is proving excellent for detecting these 18cm signals from far-off megamasers. At nearly 5 billion light years away, Nkalakatha is the most distant megamaser ever discovered in this way.
Nkalakatha was spotted in MeerKAT observations that were taken as part of a project called LADUMA. LADUMA stands for ‘Looking at the Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array’.
“The main goal of LADUMA is to use very sensitive radio-wavelength observations of gas in distant galaxies to investigate how galaxies have evolved over the past nine billion years of cosmic time,” said UCT Associate Professor Sarah Blyth, co-lead of the LADUMA project.
“By measuring the neutral hydrogen gas in galaxies from the distant past to now, LADUMA will contribute to our understanding of the evolution of the Universe.”
Dr Marcin Glowacki, formerly a researcher at the Inter-University Institute for Data-Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) and UWC, now based at the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research said: “Although our primary aim is to study neutral hydrogen gas in galaxies, very excitingly, we also expect to find many OH megamasers in our very sensitive data.” Glowacki is the lead author of the work.
Although the full LADUMA project will take more than 3000 hours of MeerKAT observations to be complete, the Nkalakatha megamaser was discovered after just one night.
“It's impressive that in a single night of observations with MeerKAT, we already found a record-breaking megamaser” said Glowacki.
“For the LADUMA project to have already led to a significant scientific publication at such an early stage is remarkable. We cannot wait to see what other treasures will be uncovered by the rest of the LADUMA observations.”
Professor Jeremy Darling, a megamaser expert and LADUMA team member from the University of Colorado in the United States said the outlook is bright.
“MeerKAT will probably double the known number of these rare phenomena.
“Galaxies were thought to merge more often in the past, and the newly discovered OH megamasers will allow us to test this hypothesis. The OH megamasers act like bright lights that say: here is a collision of galaxies that is making new stars and feeding massive black holes.”
The LADUMA project consists of an international team of researchers, with members from South Africa, Australia, Chile, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, the UK, and the US.
Cape Times