The 1.28 GHz MeerKAT Galactic Center Mosaic · HackerPapers discussions

The 1.28 GHz MeerKAT Galactic Center Mosaic — mentioned by marbs

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:16:19 GMT

If you drive from Cambridge (UK) to Wimpole, you'll see some impressively large radio telescopes that belong to the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO). However, there's much more that's not visible from the road. Hidden behind the trees, MRAO has a prototype SKA-Low array (from before the full installation in Australia), and three dishes from a HERA prototype. The MRAO itself has a fascinating history, notably including the discovery of the first pulsar by Jocelyn Bell using the wonderfully named Interplanetary Scintillation Array, which consisted of over four thousand dipole antennas…

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The 1.28 GHz MeerKAT Galactic Center Mosaic — mentioned by Keysh

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 15:06:13 GMT

The reported angular resolution (in the main paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10541) is 4 arcseconds. This is radio interferometry, which makes for better resolution, but it’s at a very low frequency (centered around 1.28 GHz = about 23 cm), which makes for worse resolution.

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The 1.28 GHz MeerKAT Galactic Center Mosaic — mentioned by jcims

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 12:33:10 GMT

I think they messed up. I quickly scanned and couldn't find any reference to what they are talking about in the paper, but if you look at the resolutions involved it's much more likely they are talking about parsecs, which is defined as 'the distance from the sun at which 1 AU subtends a distance of 1 arcsecond' or a little over 3 light years. Paper is here - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10541.pdf (Edit:Yes take a look at the images and scale bars on page 14)

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The 1.28 GHz MeerKAT Galactic Center Mosaic — mentioned by jcims

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 12:11:07 GMT

(not an expert in this, just a fan) Always a possibility and RF is generally more prone than visible light to artifacts, in part because its much harder to eliminate from the environment. However, in this case the brighter filaments have been observed for decades, the wide angle view of this image is from 1989 from the VLA array in New Mexico with some data augmentation from Spitzer space telescope. https://public.nrao.edu/gallery/the-center-of-our-galaxy-2/ The MeerKAT study just increases the resolution and signal to noise ratio, which has allowed us to see many more of them, but we can see…

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