Radio surveys

Mark Thompson is the co-Principal Investigator of the the MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey (MeerGAL).

MeerGAL is an ambitious project to map the southern Milky Way at 14 GHz with the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. MeerKAT is one of the precursors to the SKA telescope and will eventually comprise 64 13.5m dishes in the Karoo desert. The 14 GHz region of the spectrum is most sensitive to objects that emit with an optically thick or steep positive spectrum, e.g. optically thick planetary nebulae, pulsar wind nebulae, hypercompact HII regions or "spinning dust". The Milky Way is largely unexplored at this frequency range and MeerKAT will be the first telescope that enables us to make a sub-milliJansky, sub-arcsecond and multi-epoch large area survey of the Milky Way. By doing so we will reveal the very earliest stages in the birth of an HII region and the physics behind tiny rapidly rotating dust grains in the interstellar medium. In addition, the highly capable MeerKAT correlator system allows us to make a simultaneous spectroscopic survey of hydrogen radio recombination lines and methanol masers, which enables a complete 3D map to be made of the southern Milky Way.

Mark Thompson leads the Galactic Plane Science Working Group of the ASKAP EMU survey

EMU stands for the Evolutionary Map of the Universe and is a sensitive all-sky survey at 1.4 GHz aimed at studying the formation and evolution of galaxies. However, EMU will also make the most sensitive map of the Milky Way at 1.4 GHz, which will enable us to study a range of phenomena from young supernovae to HII regions. At Hertfordshire we are particularly interested in the potential for EMU to detect young compact HII regions, which will enable us to study the early stages in the development of a massive star.