Welcome
to the website of Tobias Westmeier. I am a Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) which is a joint venture between Curtin University and the University of Western Australia. Being an expert in radio interferometry and spectral-line radio observations, my research interests include the study of neutral hydrogen gas in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies with the aim to understand its role in the structure and evolution of galaxies residing in different environments. I am a member of several large survey projects for the SKA precursor telescopes ASKAP and MeerKAT, including the WALLABY, DINGO, MHONGOOSE and LADUMA projects.
In addition to my scientific interests, I am also involved in the development of techniques for the automated detection and parametrisation of galaxies in radio astronomical surveys. I am the leader of the SoFiA project which aims to develop a source finding pipeline for radio astronomical data cubes.
Please visit my personal website for more information about my other interests outside of astronomy.
Contact
Times Square, New York, USA
Tobias Westmeier
ICRAR M468
The University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway
Crawley WA 6009
Australia
E-mail: This e-mail address has been obfuscated as a protection against criminal humans, and a graphical web browser with CSS support (e.g. Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.) is required to properly display it. That being said, my e-mail address certainly isn’t mail@ed.reiemtsew-saibot
ORCID: 0000-0002-5300-2486
News
2024
- 29 October 2024 – A new stable release, SoFiA 2.6, of the Source Finding Application brings plenty of improvements and additional features, most notably the ability to load a source mask without having to rerun the source finder or linker, the option of supplying a flagging cube, support for the AST library and the ability to compile SoFiA with a C++ compiler. Please see the release notes on GitLab for more information.
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23 September 2024 – The second WALLABY public data release is out! PDR2 releases source catalogues, images, spectra and kinematic models of about 1800 galaxies to the community. These are available from CADC and CASDA, either through your web browser or via the VO TAP protocol. Please see the data release notes on the WALLABY website for more information about the release and how to access the data. The associated data release paper (Murugeshan, Deg, Westmeier et al., PASA, in press) is available on arXiv.
- 13 August 2024 – I delivered a WALLABY update at the IAU General Assembly in Cape Town to report on the latest WALLABY science results and public data release. A video recording of my talk (and the entire session) is available on YouTube.
2022
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15 November 2022 – The WALLABY survey has released its first data from phase 1 of the pilot survey to the public. The data release includes catalogues, images and spectra of about 600 galaxies detected in H i emission as well as kinematic models for more than 100 spatially resolved galaxies. The data release is accompanied by a media release and two papers (DOI:10.1017/pasa.2022.50, DOI:10.1017/pasa.2022.43) describing the data.
- 23 June 2022 – A new stable version of the SoFiA source finding pipeline, SoFiA 2.5, has been released to the public. Notable new features include position–velocity diagrams and installation via Docker container.
- 5 April 2022 – The outcome of the formal review of all ASKAP survey science projects has been announced today. The WALLABY survey has received the highest possible mark of A and has been allocated 8832 h over the first 5 years of full ASKAP operations. Congratulations to the entire WALLABY team on this excellent outcome!
2021
- 1 July 2021 – The SoFiA 2 paper has been accepted for publication in MNRAS. A copy of the accepted version is available on arXiv:2106.15789.
- 8 February 2021 – A new stable version of the H i source finding pipeline, SoFiA 2.3, is now available for download from GitLab. It comes with numerous improvements and new features as detailed in the release notes.
2020
- 10 July 2020 – The WALLABY overview paper has been accepted for publication in Astrophysics and Space Science. A copy of the accepted manuscript is available for download from arXiv.
- 27 May 2020 – The latest stable version of our H i source finding pipeline, SoFiA 2.2.0, is available for download from GitLab. SoFiA is now fully multi-threaded, resulting in a significant improvement in speed on multi-core machines.
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20 March 2020 – The first WALLABY pilot survey field in the direction of the Hydra cluster has been calibrated and imaged. The spectacular moment map of the Hydra field produced by SoFiA is featured on the ATNF Daily Astronomy Picture and in the March issue of the ASKAP Commissioning Update.
2019
- 31 August 2019 – As announced in the latest ASKAP Commissioning Update (PDF), the ASKAP pilot surveys have officially started, with 100 h of observing time allocated to each project for testing their survey strategies. The first scientific results from the pilot surveys are expected to be released soon.
- 1 August 2019 – The first stable version of SoFiA 2 has been released and is available on GitLab. For SoFiA 2 we converted the entire code base from the old mix of Python, Cython and C++ to plain C. As a result, SoFiA 2 is significantly easier to install, requires significantly less memory, and runs much faster by at least a factor of two. The conversion to C will also allow us to more easily parallelise the pipeline, which is currently work in progress.
- 29 March 2019 – Today we released SoFiA 1.3, the latest stable release of the Source Fining Application. The latest version adds several new features, including quality flags, additional linker filtering options, automated flagging of residual continuum emission and memory usage tracking. In addition, several bugs throughout the pipeline have been fixed, and some of the existing features have been improved, most notably mask dilation, reliability filtering and the graphical user interface.
2018
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1 November 2018 – The first WALLABY early science paper on the NGC 7162 group by my student Tristan Reynolds has been accepted for publication in MNRAS and is now available from ADS and arXiv.
The WALLABY survey has a new website at https://wallaby-survey.org/ with the latest information and updates on early science data processing and other WALLABY activities. -
27 June 2018 – ICRAR and CSIRO will jointly host the 2018 ICRAR/CASS Radio School in Geraldton, Western Australia, during the week of October 1–5, 2018. The school will have a focus on ASKAP and MWA data processing and include a day trip to the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. The registration deadline was 6 July 2018. Please click on the image to download the official poster.
2017
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4 December 2017 – I created a new, improved all-sky map of HVCs based on the HI4PI survey. FITS images of the map can be downloaded from my website. The new HVC map is described in Westmeier 2018, MNRAS, 474, 289 and featured in an ICRAR press release and on the ATNF Daily Astronomy Picture.
- 25 October 2016 – Today we released version 1.1 of SoFiA, the H i source finding pipeline. The source code and detailed information about SoFiA are available on GitLab. SoFiA 1.1 is also featured on the ATNF Daily Astronomy Picture.
- 6 September 2017 – A new paper presenting a deep H i survey of the Sculptor group region with the Parkes telescope appears in MNRAS today: Westmeier et al. 2017, MNRAS, 472, 4832. Overall, we detect 31 H i sources (8 of which are new); the resulting H i mass function is essentially flat in agreement with previous group studies. The results are also featured on the ATNF Daily Astronomy Picture.
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16 February 2017 – An experimental version of a new web-based FITS data viewer is now online. The viewer is entirely written in JavaScript and should work in all modern web browsers. It is designed to display both 2-D and 3-D image data and is capable of loading local FITS files as well.
- 17 January 2017 – ASKAP has officially started early science observations, as announced in a press release by the Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science.
2016
- 8 September 2016 – The Australian Research Council (ARC) announced today that the Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (CAASTRO–3D) and the Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGRav) will both be funded, with a total of more than $60 million of ARC funding awarded.
- 13 July 2016 – Today we released version 1.0 of SoFiA, the H i source finding pipeline. The source code and detailed information about SoFiA are available on GitLab.
2015
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28 October 2015 – Congratulations to the entire ASKAP team on winning CSIRO’s most prestigious award, the 2015 Chairman’s Medal, for “revolutionising astronomy by developing a spectacular new capability for observing wide areas of the sky using the world’s first wide-field imaging receivers for radio astronomy on the antennas of the ASKAP radio telescope”.
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29 August 2015 – The WALLABY project launched its new logo which is featured as today’s ATNF daily astronomy picture and will help to increase the project’s visibility among the astronomy community as well as the general public.
- 16 July 2015 – The results of our search for H Ⅰ in nine newly discovered Milky Way satellite galaxy candidates is featured on today’s ATNF daily astronomy picture.
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21 May 2015 – In today’s joint AAO/ICRAR/CSIRO media release, “A Galaxy’s Snacking Habits Revealed”, we present the results of a multi-wavelength study of the chemical composition and evolution of the interacting galaxy pair NGC 1512/1510 published in MNRAS. Additional information about the release is available on the website of Ángel López-Sánchez. The work has also been featured on today’s ATNF Daily Astronomy Picture.
- 7 February 2015 – Our ATCA H Ⅰ image of NGC 300 featured as the ATNF daily astronomy picture.
- 21 January 2015 – The SoFiA paper has been accepted for publication in MNRAS and can now be downloaded from ADS and arXiv. SoFiA was also featured on the ATNF daily astronomy picture.
2014 and older
- 8 July 2014 – There is an interesting news article in Science News on our latest paper studying the ionised component of the Magellanic Stream (Fox et al. 2014).
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November 2013 – New H Ⅰ source finding and parametrisation software is now available for download:
- 25 May 2012 – The outcome of the SKA site selection process has been announced, with both Australia/New Zealand and southern Africa getting part of the SKA. The details of the dual-site approach are explained on the SKA website.
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September 2011 – TheSkyNet is now online! TheSkyNet is a citizen science project that allows participants to donate computer processing time to research projects in radio astronomy. One of the intended applications for theSkyNet is source finding on HIPASS data cubes and ASKAP simulations.