Engineering and science highlights of the KAT-7 radio telescope

Foley, A. R.; Alberts, Thomas E.; Armstrong, R. P.; Barta, András; Bauermeister, E. F.; Bester, Hertzog L.; Blose, S.; Booth, R. S.; Botha, D. H.; Buchner, S.; Carignan, C.; Cheetham, T.; Cloete, K.; Coreejes, G.; Crida, R. C.; Cross, S. D.; Curtolo, F.; Dikgale, A.; Villiers, Mattieu S. de; Toit, L. J. du; Esterhuyse, S. W. P.; Fanaroff, B. L.; Fender, R. P.; Fijalkowski, M.; Fourie, D.J.; Frank, B. S.; George, D.; Gibbs, Philip E.; Goedhart, S.; Grobbelaar, Jasper; Gumede, S. C.; Herselman, P.; Hess, Kelley M.; Hoek, N.; Horrell, Jasper; Jonas, J. L.; Jordaan, Jacques; Julie, Roufurd; Kapp, F.; Kotzé, P.; Kusel, T. W.; Langman, Alan W.; Lehmensiek, Robert; Liebenberg, D. H.; Liebenberg, Ian; Loots, Anita; Lord, R. T.; Lucero, D. M.; Ludick, J.; Macfarlane, Peter S.; Madlavana, M.; Magnus, Lindsay; Magozore, C.; Malan, J. A.; Manley, Jason; Marais, Lelanie; Marais, N.; Marais, S. J.; Maree, Matthys; Martens, A.; Mokone, O. J.; Moss, V. A.; Mthembu, S.; New, Wesley; Nicholson, Gareth; Niekerk, P. C. van; Oozeer, Nadeem; Passmoor, S. S.; Peens-Hough, A.; Pińska, A. B.; Prozesky, P.; Rajan, S. C.; Ratcliffe, S.; Renil, Rosly; Richter, L.; Rosekrans, D.; Rust, A.; Schröder, Anja; Schwardt, Ludwig; Seranyane, S.; Serylak, M.; Shepherd, D. S.; Siebrits, R.; Sofeya, L.; Spann, R.; Springbok, R.; Swart, Paul; Thondikulam, Venkatasubramani L.; Theron, I.P.; Tiplady, A. J.; Toruvanda, O.; Tshongweni, S.; Heever, Lize Van den; Merwe, C. van der; Rooyen, Ruby van; Wakhaba, S.; Walker, A. L.; Welz, M. G.; Williams, L. P.; Wolleben, M.; Woudt, P. A.; Young, Neil J.; Zwart, Jonathan T. L.

doi:10.1093/mnras/stw1040

Cited by 35 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…The seven-dish Karoo Array Telescope (Foley et al 2016) was built as an engineering prototype for the 64-dish MeerKAT array in the Karoo region of the Northen Cape, South Africa. It consists of 7 12-m diameter dishes with prime focus linearly-polarised receivers covering a frequency range of 1.2 to 1.95 GHz.…”

Section: Kat-7mentioning

confidence: 99%

Periodic variability of the mainline hydroxyl masers in G9.62+0.20E

Goedhart

Rooyen

Walt

et al. 2019

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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We present the results of a monitoring campaign using the KAT-7 and HartRAO 26m telescopes, of hydroxyl, methanol and water vapour masers associated with the highmass star forming region G9.62+0.20E. Periodic flaring of the main line hydroxyl masers were found, similar to that seen in the 6.7 and 12.2 GHz methanol masers. The 1667 MHz flares are characterized by a rapid decrease in flux density which is coincident with the start of the 12.2 GHz methanol maser flare. The decrease in the OH maser flux density is followed by a slow increase till a maximum is reached after which the maser decays to its pre-flare level. A possible interpretation of the rapid decrease in the maser flux density is presented. Considering the projected separation between the periodic methanol and OH masers, we conclude that the periodic 12.2 methanol masing region is located about 1600 AU deeper into the molecular envelope compared to the location of the periodic OH masers. A single water maser flare was also detected which seems not to be associated with the same event that gives rise to the periodic methanol and OH maser flares.

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Section: Kat-7mentioning

confidence: 99%

Periodic variability of the mainline hydroxyl masers in G9.62+0.20E

Goedhart

Rooyen

Walt

et al. 2019

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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“…The ROACH2 boards can be booted either by loading the kernel from the ROACH2 server (net boot) or from the on-board memory chip (solo boot). A BORPH (Berkeley Operating System for ReProgrammable Hardware) operating system, which is a full-featured Linux operating system supporting FPGA applications(So Hayden Kwok-Hay & Brodersen, 2007) is run on the ROACH2 boards, and the ROACH2 board can be controlled via an interface called the Karoo Array Telescope Control Protocol (KATCP) (Foley et al, 2016). Compiled binary executable programs (bof file) can be uploaded to the ROACH2 boards as firmware.…”

Section: System Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

The design and implementation of a ROACH2+GPU based correlator on the Tianlai dish array

Niu

Wang

MacMahon

et al. 2019

Res. Astron. Astrophys.

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The digital correlator is a crucial element in a modern radio telescope. In this paper we describe a scalable design of the correlator system for the Tianlai pathfinder array, which is an experiment dedicated to test the key technologies for conducting 21cm intensity mapping survey. The correlator is of the FX design, which firstly performs Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) including Polyphase Filter Bank (PFB) computation using a Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) Reconfigurable Open Architecture Computing Hardware-2 (ROACH2) board, then computes cross-correlations using Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). The design has been tested both in laboratory and in actual observation.

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“…We recently began to address the first open question by selecting a mass-limited (M 500 > 4 × 10 14 M ⊙ ) sample of nearby (z < 0.1) clusters from the Planck SZ cluster catalogue ( [14]) and observed it with the 7-element Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7, [18]) at 1.86 GHz. The sample, consisting of 15 clusters observed with a 2.3 − 2.9 arcmin angular resolution (depending upon declination), is described in [19], to which we refer the reader for details.…”

Section: Kat-7 Observations Of Galaxy Clustersmentioning

confidence: 99%

A MeerKAT View on Galaxy Clusters

Bernardi¹,

Venturi²,

Cassano³

et al. 2018

Proceedings of MeerKAT Science: On the Pathway to the SKA — PoS(MeerKAT2016)

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Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa.Almost two decades of observations of radio emission in galaxy clusters have proven the existence of relativistic particles and magnetic fields that generate extended synchrotron emission in the form of radio halos. In the current scenario, radio halos are generated through reacceleration of relativistic electrons by turbulence generated by cluster mergers. Although this theoretical framework has received increasingly supporting observational evidence over the last ten years, observations of statistically complete samples are needed in order to fundamentally test model predictions. In this paper we briefly review our 7-element Karoo Radio Telescope observations of a sample of nearby clusters aimed to test the predictions of the turbulent reacceleration model in small systems (M 500 > 4 × 10 14 M ⊙ ). We conclude by presenting two galaxy cluster surveys to be carried out with MeerKAT in order to provide crucial test of models of radio halo formation in nearby (z < 0.1) and high redshift (z > 0.4) systems respectively.

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Engineering and science highlights of the KAT-7 radio telescope

Cited by 35 publications

References 35 publications

Periodic variability of the mainline hydroxyl masers in G9.62+0.20E

Periodic variability of the mainline hydroxyl masers in G9.62+0.20E

The design and implementation of a ROACH2+GPU based correlator on the Tianlai dish array

A MeerKAT View on Galaxy Clusters

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