Abstract

Invited Talk - Plenary

Wednesday, 14 September 2022, 11:00   (Keksdose / virtual plenum)

A MeerKAT Science Overview

Roger Deane
University of the Witwatersrand / University of Pretoria

The MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa has already amassed a wide range of world-leading and in some cases, unexpected advances in our knowledge of the radio sky at GHz frequencies. These include amongst the most distant detections of HI emission and OH masers, new pulsar and transient discoveries, previously unseen radio galaxy morphological features, and transformative new perspectives of well-studied cosmic laboratories like our Galactic Centre and extragalactic legacy fields. I will give an overview of MeerKAT and its science highlights to date, and look ahead toward its extension to MeerKAT+, and eventually SKA1-MID. I will discuss emerging themes in the scientific opportunities that MeerKAT enables, alongside synergies with wide-field Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) surveys, as progress is made toward SKA-VLBI, and, even further in the future, the envisaged SKA2-MID array spread across the African continent.