The MeerKAT Fornax Survey (MFS, PI Paolo Serra) is a dedicated large survey project planned by the MeerKAT telescope, the South-African precursor of the SKA. The MeerKAT telescope was inaugurated in July 2018. As of early 2019, MeerKAT will observe for 900 hours the Fornax cluster to study its assembly of new gas-rich galaxies and groups and the physics of gas accretion occurring in its...
SKA precursors are going to revolutionize our view of the Milky Way. ASKAP is entering its regime phase and one of its large program, EMU, is the largest radio survey ever designed at the planned depth of 10 μJy/beam. In the wide context of the preparation for EMU and ASKAP we present the SCORPIO project, an ATCA survey of a patch of the Galactic plane, originally covering a ∼5-square-degree....
SKA precursors have just started to collect data, whose amount is so huge that is somehow overwhelming scientists. And the data stream is going to blow up once the precursors will be fully operational, not to mention SKA itself. How are we preparing for this? Automation in data reduction and analysis is mandatory but it is still far to be complete with respect to all the cases the radio...
The ingredients for the recipe to make a “habitable” planet like our own Earth are: a relatively small rocky planet, at the right distance from the host star, with a not too thick atmosphere rich in volatiles and capable of developing interstellar complex organic molecules (iCOMs) chemistry. Searches for exoplanets have shown a large degree of diversity in the planetary systems, and as yet is...
The improvement in sensitivity of radio telescopes is disclosing a brand new method for searching and characterizing extrasolar planets. Mutual magnetic interaction between an exoplanet and its parent star (or even one of its satellites) can give rise to a electron cyclotron maser emission (ECME), known as auroral radio emission. The radio emission has a peculiar signature in time and in...
I will present an overview of the ongoing and planned activities of the italian radioastronomical community related to pulsar and Fast Radio Burst science, in view of the SKA.
Globular clusters contain a large number of millisecond pulsars. Besides being extremely interesting by themselves, these pulsars are an invaluable tool to probe the cluster environment and dynamics. They can be used to search for the presence of an intermediate mass black hole in the center, ionized gas and its magnetic field. The SKA precursor MeerKAT is in a unique position as it is capable...
Radio observations of the first gravitational wave event with an electromagnetic counterpart (GRB170817) has shown unexpected features. The long lived, slowly rising, non--thermal radio emission (together with optical and X--ray observations), between 10 and 200 days after the BNS merger, is consistent with being produced by either a narrowly collimated or an isotropic outflow with geometrical...
In this talk I will overview the current open and hot questions in the area of radio emission from active galactic nuclei, and will address the impact the SKA and its precursors and pathfinders will play/are playing. I will further highlight the relevance of the SKA-VLBI in this field.
Low frequency observations have finally opened the way to the search and study of remnant radio galaxies. These sources represent the last evolutionary stage of radio galaxies when the jets have switched off, and have remained elusive and poorly understood so far. For a long time there have been claims that new sensitive surveys would lead to the discovery of many more remnant radio galaxies,...
During this talk I intend to present radio observations with the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) of a region of the sky of 8°x8°, likely associated with an over-density traced by nine massive galaxy clusters at z≈0.1. The combination of the SRT data with observations from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey revealed the presence of 28 new diffuse synchrotron radio sources with radio emissivity and X-ray...
In the next years, thanks to the advent of the SKA we expect a revolution of our knowledge about cosmic magnetism. Its precursors and pathfinders are already pushing the current limits of sensitivity and resolution and they will allow us to study large scale magnetic fields with unprecedented details. In this talk, I will present a computational tool which can produce realistic synthetic...
The quest for the 21-cm signal from the Cosmic Dawn and subsequent Epoch of Reionization has taken an unexpected turn with the reported detection of a sky-average absorption trough centred at 78 MHz (z~17, Bowman et al., 2018) whose explanation challenges any current theoretical model. In this talk I will present competing observations aimed to confirm the reported detection. I will also...
Observations of the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) through the redshifted 21 cm line represent a new frontier in observational cosmology and have motivated the construction of several low frequency radio arrays.
Detection of the redshifted 21 cm line emission is complicated by the contamination from foreground sources that are brighter by several orders of magnitude.
The dominant foreground is...
In my talk, I will present results obtained using the state-of-the-art galaxy formation model GAEA, and its most recent version including prescriptions to partition the cold gas into its atomic and molecular components (Xie et al. 2017 - X17).
I will first discuss how the most recent observational measurements available for HI selected galaxies in the local Universe compare with prescriptions...
Investigations of the population of radio-active AGN up to z=3.5 not only show that these sources are hosted by galaxies of very large, M*>10^10.5 Msun, stellar masses, but also that at all redshifts they reside in very massive dark matter halos, comparable to those associated with groups-to-clusters of galaxies. This result is found both via clustering studies and by directly pinpointing such...
The SKA and its precursor instruments will probe the HI content of galaxies to an unprecedented depth enabling investigations of environmental effects in action, such as ram pressure stripping and gravitational interactions. These significantly impact the physical properties of gas in cluster galaxies, and hence regulate their growth. There are well-established observational evidence (e.g....
