| 12th of January 2017 |
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| ASKAP Early Science |
| ASKAP Early Science with 12 PAF-equipped
antennas commenced in October 2016, led by the WALLABY team (PIs: Bärbel
Koribalski, CASS, and Lister Staveley-Smith, UWA/ICRAR + over 100 astronomers
from around the world). The ASKAP HI All Sky Survey - better known as
WALLABY - team completed 21-cm observations
for their first field after 18 nights of gathering data from 66 antenna pairs,
36 beams, over 2500 frequency channels, four polarisations, sampled every
10 seconds (all together over 10 Terabytes of data recorded on disk). The first field (30 square degree in size) was chosen to target the nearby NGC 7232 galaxy group and many other interesting galaxies and galaxy pairs. With a limited bandwidth of 48 MHz (divided into 2592 channels) we expect to detect more than 100 galaxies, among them many new discoveries. The second WALLABY Early Science field targeted the nearby and very well known Fornax galaxy cluster; we are able to increase the bandwdth to 192 MHz (divided into 10368 channels). ASKAP observations continued non-stop over the Christmas and the New Year period, gathering data on another two WALLABY fields, all done remotely via queue scheduling. Data processing is under way using a dedicated pipeline (ASKAPsoft) on one of Pawsey's Cray supercomputers named Galaxy. First results appeared on ADAP, e.g. ASKAP-12 hydrogen maps of the galaxy IC 5201 and ASKAP 36-beam image of the NGC 7232 field. |