Astronomers find 49 galaxies in under three hours

The raw data were transferred to the ilifu supercomputing cloud system and reduced there. Bandpass, flux, and phase calibration, along with self-calibrated continuum imaging, was performed using the PROCESSMEERKAT pipeline,1 which is written in PYTHON, uses a purpose-built CASA (McMullin et al. 2007) Singularity container, and employs MPICASA (a parallelized form of CASA). Data were at this stage rebinned by a factor of 4 (i.e. to ‘8K’ mode, 104.49-kHz wide channels), and the 1304–1420-MHz segment of the L band was extracted for the results presented in this paper. Model continuum visibility data were subtracted from the corrected visibility data using the CASA task uvsub. A second-order polynomial fit to the continuum was then calculated and subtracted using the CASA task uvcontsub for all channels to remove residual continuum emission from the spectral line data. Finally, spectral line cubes were created using tclean with robust = 0.5 and no cleaning. The RMS per 104.49 kHz channel was consistent between 1304 and 1420 MHz with the per-channel noise of 0.16 mJy beam−1 at the centre (1362 MHz). All channels were convolved to a common synthesized beam of 14.0 × 9.8 arcsec2 at a position angle of −20 1.