MeerKAT telescope detects most distant hydroxyl megamaser 8 billion light-years away

Key facts

• Astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa detected the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever observed, located in a galaxy more than 8 billion light-years away.
• The discovery paper was accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters and a pre-print is available on arXiv.
• The megamaser’s intensity qualifies it as a gigamaser, the brightest class of space lasers produced when hydroxyl molecules in merging galaxies collide and amplify radio emissions.
• A foreground galaxy, perfectly aligned with the distant megamaser, acts as a gravitational lens, further amplifying the radio signal during its journey to Earth.
• Dr. Thato Manamela, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pretoria, is the lead author of the study.
• Prof. Roger Deane, Director of the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) and professor at the Universities of Cape Town and Pretoria, is a co-author.
• MeerKAT’s centimeter-wavelength sensitivity and advanced computational pipelines processed terabytes of data to enable the discovery.
• Systematic surveys led by the University of Pretoria aim to find hundreds to thousands of similar systems ahead of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) era.