WWW.ASTRONOMY.COM 31
telescopes like MeerKAT.
Consisting of 64 antennas in South
Africa’s Karoo region, it’s just as
sensitive as the VLA. Eventually,
it will become part of the Square
Kilometer Array, which will be the
most powerful radio telescope on
Earth once completed in 2030, and
comprise dishes scattered across
South Africa and Australia.
MeerKAT saw first light in 2016
and, when the first call went out
for non-South Africans to propose
observations with MeerKAT, I
jumped at the chance. My targets?
A half-dozen TDEs, most of which
had never been observed at radio
wavelengths.
And that’s how I found myself
waking up one morning to a cell-
phone chime triggered by a radio
telescope half a world away.
I’ve been lucky enough in my
career to use a dozen different
radio telescopes, but it was clear
from the beginning that MeerKAT
is different. I’m used to sources
appearing as featureless blobs,
but the detail and wide field of
MeerKAT images make them
unquestionably the prettiest I’ve
seen — a large swath of sky with
dozens of tiny galaxies floating in
space. It is not unlike the Hubble
Deep Field, but instead of the vis-
ible starlight Hubble sees, the gal-
axies in MeerKAT’s radio images
are powered by the supermassive
black holes dwelling in their cen-
ters interacting with stray gas and
dust. These encounters are steady,
low-energy events that fuel most
of the black holes in the universe.
Still, they’re not what I’m after.Finally, the MeerKAT image
loads on my laptop. I pause to
take in the whole thing — it feels
like floating in space, if just for
a moment — before zooming in
to the center. And ... there! A
smudge of light at the center —
the f lare from a dying star whose
remnants are being swallowed by
a black hole, suspended alone in
the middle of the cosmic ocean.
I smile and start planning the
next steps of my analysis. The end
of this star’s journey means the
beginning of my attempt to
unravel its story, and there’s a lot
of work to do.The region
surrounding the
Milky Way Galaxy’s
center has two
enormous bubbles
of hot gas being
blown (upward and
downward) in this
MeerKAT image —
evidence of the
supermassive
black hole’s
influence on its
environment. Hot,
thin magnetic
filaments are also
visible, where
strands of the
black hole’s
powerful magnetic
field have heated
and energized gas.
SOUTH AFRICAN RADIO
ASTRONOMY OBSERVATORY
(SARAO)Yvette Cendes is a postdoctoral
fellow at the Center for Astrophysics
| Harvard & Smithsonian. Follow her
on Twitter @whereisyvette.