The Cosmic Savannah - Ep. 77: Troublesome Inkathazo & the Age of Giants

Hosted by Dr. Jacinta Delhaize, Dr. Tshiamiso Makwela & Dr. Daniel Cunnama.

In this "mid-season special" episode, we introduce you to an extraordinary giant radio galaxy nicknamed "Inkathazo", meaning 'trouble' in isiXhosa and isiZulu. We speak with Kathleen Charlton, a Master's student from the University of Cape Town, about the discovery of Inkathazo and her newly published work on the topic.

 

Kathleen spoke with us from the University of Oxford, where she was working with team members from the 'MIGHTEE' collaboration. She describes her experiences of first attending the AGN Populations Across Continents and Cosmic Time conference in Durham and then her research visit to Oxford. She also explains her research into both hydrogen absorption and giant radio galaxies.

 

In her newly published paper, Kathleen uses South Africa's MeerKAT telescope to study the strange physics going on in three giant radio galaxies (or GRGs for short). GRGs are behemoth galaxies spewing out plasma jets spanning millions of light-years. She nicknamed one of these 'Inkathazo', which means 'trouble' in the African Xhosa and Zulu languages, because of its "troublesome" properties. It has unusually bent plasma jets and resides at the center of a galaxy cluster. This raises intriguing questions about how these enormous structures form and evolve.

 

Kathleen describes how she used MeerKAT to create some of the highest-resolution "spectral age maps" of giant radio galaxies ever made. These maps track the age of the plasma across different parts of the GRG, providing clues about the complex plasma physics at work in these extreme galaxies.

 

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