Episode 75: Exploring the Universe at the SARAO Conference
with Dr Mpati Ramotsoku and Dr Emmanuel Proven Adzuri
In this double feature episode, Jacinta interviews two amazing astronomers at the SARAO conference (South African Radio Astronomical Observatory).
Dr.Mpati Ramotsoku is a radio astrophysicist from South Africa. In the episode she discusses her journey from studying in the Netherlands to working in Italy at the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics in Cali, and eventually returning to South Africa as a research associate at Rhodes University. She delves into her research on how galaxies evolve by studying hydrogen gas in galaxies and the environmental effects on galaxy evolution, such as ram pressure stripping. Mpati also shares her discovery of new filaments in galaxies through images from the MeerKAT Telescope, a finding which has garnered international attention.
Dr. Emanuel Proven Adzuri is a Ghanaian astronomer at the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute and the Ghana Radio Astronomy Observatory. In this episode he shares his background and journey in astronomy. Emanuel discusses his education in computational engineering and astronomy that led to a groundbreaking PhD project on space lasers, specifically focusing on the periodicity of methanol masers in star-forming regions. Emanuel also discusses the advancements in Ghana’s astronomy infrastructure, including the transformation of a decommissioned telecom dish into a 32-meter radio telescope.
Join us for this insightful and exciting episode of The Cosmic Savannah!
This Week’s Guests
Related Episodes
Acknowledgements
Podcast Manager and Show Notes: Francois Campher
Social Media Manager: Sumari Hatting
Transcripts: Abigail Thambiran
Audio Editing: Jacob Fine
And all of our volunteers!
Transcripts
[00:00:00] Jacinta: Welcome to the Cosmic Savannah with Dr. Tshiamiso Makwela and Dr. Jacinta Delhaize. Each episode we’ll be giving you a behind the scenes look at world class astronomy and astrophysics happening under African skies.
[00:00:17] Tshia: Let us introduce you to the people involved, the technology we use, the exciting work we do, and the fascinating discoveries we make.
[00:00:25] Jacinta: Sit back and relax as we take you on a safari through the skies.
[00:00:33] Tshia: Okay. Hello Jacinta.
[00:00:34] Jacinta: Hi Tshia.
[00:00:35] Tshia: I’m so happy to see you today with all your hair done.
[00:00:39] Jacinta: Oh!
[00:00:39] Tshia: Looking nice…
[00:00:40] Jacinta: Thank you
[00:00:40] Tshia: Silky…. straight…
[00:00:42] Jacinta: Thank you.
[00:00:42] Tshia: All of those things.
[00:00:43] Jacinta: Thank you for noticing. I got it done last night and I was really sad that there was no one to see it, so.
[00:00:47] Tshia: Oh, yeah! Did you get one of those feelings that, oh, my hair looks so
[00:00:52] good that I have to go out?
[00:00:53] Jacinta: Yeah, I did. I did.
[00:00:55] Tshia: So like a lot more people, I need to share this with too many people.
[00:00:58] Jacinta: So I, I walked my dog on the street, but it was 9:00 PM and no one was out. But I was like, but I look good. My hair, I flick it!
[00:01:08] Tshia: Well, it sounds like you had a nice time, just like you did last year at the SARAO conference.
[00:01:13] Jacinta: Oh, I like your segue there, Tshia. Yes, I did. We should also mention that Dan’s not here today.
[00:01:20] Tshia: Yes
[00:01:20] Jacinta: He is, I think he’s in Italy, actually.
[00:01:22] Tshia: He said Italy.
[00:01:23] Jacinta: Yes
[00:01:24] Tshia: And he’s recovering from the marathon?
[00:01:26] Jacinta: Yes
[00:01:26] Tshia: Because Dan is a superstar.
[00:01:28] Jacinta: He did amazingly. I guess we’ll, we’ll let him tell you how he did when he’s back.
[00:01:32] Tshia: Yeah. He’ll tell you the full story of the 90, almost 90 kilometers that he ran.
[00:01:36] Jacinta: Yeah, crazy. Never. Yes. But he’s in Italy at the moment, so it’s Tshia and I with you today. But yeah, as you were saying, I attended the SARAO Bursary conference. So SARAO stands for the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, S-A-R-A-O. And each year there’s this big conference where all of the students and postdoctoral researchers that they fund, come together and talk about their research on radio astronomy and MeerKAT and other African telescopes and yeah. So the last few episodes actually that we’ve aired have been discussions I had at the conference so I think that was with…
[00:02:14] Tshia: James?
[00:02:15] Jacinta: Yeah. So that was James in episode 74 and before that there was Eli Kasai on episode 73 and today we have two more. So today we have Dr. Mpati Ramatsoku and Dr. Emanuelle Proven Adzuri, who I also spoke to there.
[00:02:31] Tshia: Yeah, I think these interviews were quite exciting, although really short because you know, we really wanted to know more about the science that they do, but tell us a bit more about what you and Mpati spoke about.
[00:02:42] Jacinta: Yeah, you’re right. They were short because we only had these tiny little gaps between sessions, which I was like, please, can we do an interview? Because I’ve been trying to get Mpati for years.
[00:02:50] Tshia: I can imagine. She, she’s really hard to find, actually.
[00:02:55] Jacinta: Yes, yes. So she’s really awesome. So she’s, she’s originally from South Africa, from a region as she’ll say, uh, near Lesotho and she has gone on to do her PhD in astronomy in the Netherlands, and then moved on to Italy where she did a postdoc and now she’s kind of still living there while working also for South Africa. She’s a hotshot radio astronomer and yeah, it was really exciting to talk to her about her research that she does with MeerKAT on mostly hydrogen gas and galaxies and a little bit about radio galaxies. So, both my particular fields of interest. So I enjoyed having a good chat with her.
[00:03:31] Tshia: I could tell you’re quite excited.
[00:03:33] Jacinta: Yes. So, so that was really cool. And then with Emanuelle, so Emanuelle is actually from Ghana and he was telling me all about astronomy in Ghana and how they’ve got this big radio telescope there. The Ghana Radio Telescope, which is 32 meters, a refurbished. It used to be for like tracking satellites and then they kind of repurposed it into astronomy, which is awesome. That’s really cool.
[00:03:56] Tshia: That is really cool.
[00:03:57] Jacinta: Yeah, so it was really cool to talk to Emanuelle and you know, hear all about this community in Ghana that I didn’t know anything about. And yeah, it was really cool to see the work going on there and Emanuelle’s mostly working on something called methanol masers.
[00:04:11] Tshia: Oh, that’s, that’s quite exciting. I mean, I’ve never been to Ghana myself, but with the work that we do at the OAE, we’ve supported some of the work that’s happening at the G-S-S-T-I, which is the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute, where Emanuelle is based, because I know that there are schools within the five kilometer radius of where that telescope is, and they’re trying to to get a lot more people involved in the science.
[00:04:37] So we’ve done some work from the OAE with them, which is quite exciting. But also just to tie this in with some of the interviews we’ve had already with Renee, for example, who started through NASSP , Mpati was one of those as well, started at UCT. But before she went for her PhD, she was at UCT for, for the NASSP master’s and honors. So, which was quite great to, to see how all of our interviews are coming together this time.
[00:05:03] Jacinta: Yeah, definitely. That’s so cool that you’ve been working with the Ghana Space Science and, uh, what is it? G-S-S-T-I. Ghana, Space Science and Technology Institute. Yeah, that sounds really exciting and you said the OAE now, just for listeners who are tuning in for the first time, what is that?
[00:05:19] Tshia: So the OAE is one of the IAU offices, International Astronomy Union offices. So that office is Office of Astronomy for Education. So it’s focusing on professionalizing astronomy for primary and secondary schools. So using real astronomy into your maths, your physics, your science where astronomy as a subject doesn’t exist in those countries. So we’re trying to use the skills of astronomy into those subjects and then in promoting astronomy essentially.
[00:05:48] Jacinta: That’s so cool. And so you are a postdoctoral researcher at the OAE, right?
[00:05:51] Tshia: Yes.
[00:05:52] Jacinta: So cool. Okay, so back to the topic at hand, yeah.
[00:05:56] Tshia: So Mpati talks about using the MeerKAT telescope and finding these amazing filaments that she speaks about in the interview. But maybe Jacinta, can you just tell us a little bit more about the MeerKAT? Because I know your research group is working on the MeerKAT.
[00:06:10] Jacinta: Yes, very much so. I’m so glad you ask. I love talking about this. Yeah, so I guess if you’ve listened to The Cosmic Savannah before, you’ll probably know all about MeerKAT, but if you’re new, then it’s a big radio telescope that is in South Africa, in the Karoo region. And it’s basically consists of 64 of these dishes, right? So if you think of a big white satellite dish, it’s essentially that, and the diameter is 13.5 meters. So these are quite big, but not as big as another one we’re gonna hear about today.
[00:06:43] And the fact that there’s 64 of them and they’re spread out over a large region means that you can combine the signals together to get a very powerful radio telescope. And it’s one of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes. And so a lot of exciting research is being done with it. Well, what I know about is in my field, which is galaxy evolution.
[00:07:02] So trying to understand how galaxies have changed and evolved over the history of the universe. And so that’s why so many of these episodes are about galaxy evolution, because those are the conferences I go to and, and, you know, where I can get the interviews. Um, so I, I acknowledge that there’s quite a bias in the topics of particularly the last few episodes.
[00:07:20] Tshia: Mm.
[00:07:20] Jacinta: Nonetheless, it’s still really interesting and what Mpati, has been using MeerKAT to do was, in one case it was, I think, just serendipitous discovery. Like she didn’t even mean to, to find, to find this or look, look for this thing, but she found this radio galaxy.
[00:07:34] Tshia: So, Mpati found a radio galaxy using MeerKAT and made a discovery. But please tell us what is that galaxy that she found actually.
[00:07:43] Jacinta: Yeah, okay. So just briefly, it’s an active galactic nucleus or an AGN. Which means super massive black hole eating stuff and growing right at the center of this galaxy. And as it’s doing that, it’s shooting out these beams of radio light basically and that’s what we call a radio galaxy. And these, these jets, they look like. If you imagine the, the blowhole of a whale, right?
[00:08:04] Tshia: Mm-Hmm.
[00:08:04] Jacinta: And at first the water jets are like all collimated and straight, and then they go phew in this big plume. Yeah? And now imagine you’ve got a, like a whale jet plume in one direction and then 180 degrees away from that. So in the exactly opposite direction, you’ve got another one, right? So, I don’t know. Stick two whales back-to-back and somehow you have these two blowholes, I don’t know know how that would work.
[00:08:24] Tshia: Know the whale.
[00:08:25] Jacinta: Okay. I dunno. It doesn’t work, but yeah. You know what I mean? Anyway, you’ve got these like two like jets pointing away from each other, and what Mpati found was like that there’s these weird links of light, like these weird stripes connecting like curving from one jet over to the other jet and they’re not curving all around and weirdly around these like plumes and you, so you’ve just got these like stripes of, of radio light coming from it. And we’re like, what is that? So that’s what she found and like no one had really seen that before. And so that went, yeah, all around the world in a big press release, this image, and it’s still not really understood what it is, but it’s, it’s got to do with like weird magnetic fields we think.
[00:09:04] And if you have a listen to the previous episode, episode 74 with James Chibueze and James is talking a little bit about what magnetic fields do to these radio jets. And so yeah, basically Mpati has found another one of these really weird things.
[00:09:18] Tshia: Yeah.
[00:09:18] Jacinta: Yeah.
[00:09:18] Tshia: And Mpati also studies H one, which is something that I know, you get so excited about. So maybe just also tell our listeners a little bit about that before we get into the interview with Mpati.
[00:09:30] Jacinta: Yeah, sure. Thank you for asking again. Yes, again, if you’ve listened to lots of our episodes, a lot of them are about H one again- ’cause that’s my field. And H one is like what we kind of call the, the nickname for neutral hydrogen gas.
[00:09:45] So it’s gas. We all know what a gas is, we breathe it, but this is pure hydrogen and it’s important because as Mpati is gonna explain. If you have no gas in a galaxy, it can’t form any stars. Yeah. And so she is trying to understand sort of what’s happening to the gas, especially when you’ve got galaxies that live in like big neighborhoods, like clusters with each other.
[00:10:07] Tshia: Yeah.
[00:10:07] Jacinta: And then like what is the impact of this galaxy living in this environment on the gas and therefore how it can form stars. So Mpati will tell us a little bit more about that.
[00:10:15] Tshia: Okay. So let’s listen to that interview with, Mpati.
[00:10:21] Jacinta: With me now is Dr. Mpati Ramatsoku. Welcome to The Cosmic Savannah.
[00:10:29] Mpati: Thank you for having me here. It’s good to be speaking to you today.
[00:10:32] Jacinta: Mpati, we’ve been trying to get you on The Cosmic Savannah for literally years now, and I finally nailed you down. We are in Cape Town at the SARAO Bursary Conference, the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, which runs MeerKAT.
[00:10:46] We have an annual conference of students and postdocs and radio related staff, and there’s supervisors and you are here and I have trapped you and now we are finally doing an interview.
[00:10:58] Mpati: I know, I know. Now we are finally here. So I’m excited to be talking about what I do and how I got here and, and everything.
[00:11:06] Jacinta: Great, well, let’s start, because I’m chairing the next session, so we’ve got a time limit. All right. So tell our listeners, who are you, where you’re from, what you do?
[00:11:14] Mpati: Well, I’m Mpati Ramatsoku, as it has already been said. I’m a radio astrophysicist. I’m from a small town called Qwaqwa in the Eastern Free State, near Lesotho. I did my undergraduate at UCT I moved to the Netherlands for PhD and I went back here as a fellow. I’m working with,the students and continuing doing the work that I love, which is, studying how galaxies evolve.
[00:11:39]
[00:11:39] Jacinta: Okay, so you’re from South Africa, but currently you are a researcher at the University of Rhodes in South Africa, and also INAF, the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics in Cagliari where you currently live.
[00:11:52] Mpati: Yes. I love living there, but , it’s good to be home. It’s good to be home, yeah. I’m a research associate at INAF and yeah, and a fellow here at Rhodes University in Makhanda in the Eastern Cape.
[00:12:05] Jacinta: Ah, yeah, it’s currently kind of going into winter in the Northern Hemisphere.
[00:12:09] Mpati: Oh, I’m so glad that I got to be here- I got the opportunity to be here at this time of year.
[00:12:13] Jacinta: Okay, great. So why are you in Italy? Explain that, how did you end up there?
[00:12:18] Mpati: Well, after my, my PhD in the Netherlands, I, I wanted to continue with astronomy. And there just happened to be this wonderful opportunity to work on, studying gas in galaxies at this institute that was in Cagliari, in small island in Italy. And yeah, I thought, what a wonderful opportunity to go and live on an island, first of all which would be great, and to study with this new group that was starting up there. And it’s been lovely. It’s been incredible being there.
[00:12:47] Jacinta: Okay. So you left South Africa during your PhD, right? You went to do part of your PhD in the Netherlands?
[00:12:54] Mpati: Yeah, I, I did part of my PhD in the Netherlands a few years ago, and it was good because the institute I was in, in Groningen at Kapteyn, was very international. I got to meet a lot of people. I got to start building up my network as a young astronomer at the time. Still very young…
[00:13:12] Jacinta: we’re all still young.
[00:13:13] Mpati: Exactly like I just had, networking with, people from all over the world, which is awesome. And I was close to the largest telescopes at the time at that institute. It was a nice experience to have left South Africa at that age and go to a completely foreign country where I didn’t even know the language.
[00:13:32] Jacinta: How did that feel? I mean it’s, I know it was a big jump for me when I was a postdoc and I moved to Croatia and then to South Africa, but even to do it at an earlier stage as a PhD student, what was that like for you?
[00:13:44] Mpati: Honestly, it was a little bit difficult at first, but the support was great. Support was, was awesome and I, I got to learn a lot about myself. I got to grow, which is quite important for me. And just experiencing different cultures and different people and learning new languages, being forced to learn a new language ’cause you have to survive was, was wonderful. I, I enjoyed that a lot. So now I can speak a little bit of Dutch, so, which is cool.
[00:14:11] Jacinta: That is cool. Can you speak, Italian?
[00:14:14] Mpati: I try to speak Italian. I can speak little bit of Italian if I have to. So yeah, so now I’ve moved to another country that speaks a different language as well, so I’m learning that too. It’s, a work in progress.
[00:14:27] Jacinta: Yeah, definitely. I can totally relate to the difficulties of not speaking the language of the country you live in, in Croatia, it was a little bit isolating and, you know, you, you do your best, but it takes quite a long time to get proficient to a level where you can make friends, I think, in that language, but also very enriching for your life.
[00:14:43] Mpati: Yes, it truly has been to just be on the streets and have somebody try to speak to you in, in this language. People in Italy are very friendly, so they will try their best to try and involve you in whatever they’re saying and you’re just like, “oh thank you, but I don’t know what you’re saying”, but it’s been very enriching, like, like you said, and I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed it a lot. It’s been an adventure to say.
[00:15:04] Jacinta: I think adventure is definitely…
[00:15:06] Mpati: Yes, definitely been, an adventure.
[00:15:09] Jacinta: Okay, so let’s talk about science now. We’ve got the fun stuff out the way. No, I’m joking. The, the most fun of all is the science, and I’m somewhat jealous of the work you have been doing in Cagliari because it looks super exciting. So tell me about that work. What have you been doing?
[00:15:26] Mpati: I have been studying gas in, in galaxies. I’m trying to understand the role nature plays in galaxy evolution. So how nature and nurture, so nurture the intrinsic properties of galaxies, how they affect, how galaxies evolve and the environment in which they live in.
[00:15:45] How does that affect the environment involved and what’s the balance? Between the two effects and it’s been quite interesting and we’re starting to find new things ’cause we now have the opportunity to have access to MeerKAT, which is an incredible telescope. Amazing data is coming out of it, and now we are seeing new things, which just raises more questions and challenges, our perceived notions of what we know about the universe right now.
[00:16:10] So I’m, I’m so excited. Every time I look at a new MeerKAT image, it’s just like. Wow! That is so new, that is so different, but what is it?
[00:16:18] Jacinta: I agree. Almost on a daily basis you see these new pictures and you’re like, “Wow! I love that. I have no idea what it is, but that’s exciting”.
[00:16:25] Mpati: Exactly. It’s, it’s incredible. Like every, every week, every month, every day, I see a new image at this conference. Just listening to all the talks, every time somebody says something, I think, wow, I didn’t know we could do that already with this telescope. So it’s been amazing. It really has been. I’m so lucky to be living in this current era in astronomy.
[00:16:45] Jacinta: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. And you actually managed to publish one of these brand new images where we didn’t understand what was going on. I think it was called like something about weird filaments in a galaxy or something. That was- that went all over the international news.
[00:16:59] Mpati: Yeah. I remember that. So we, we had found this galaxy, it was a radio galaxy with a standing lobe of diffused gas. But what we found is that these lobes were connected by these filaments. Tried finding out what those are, looked into the literature, and these were completely new nobody had ever seen these kinds of filaments before.
[00:17:19] We still don’t quite understand what causes them. We think magnetic fields have something to do with it, but this is still something that is completely new. The first time I saw the image, I thought I must have made a mistake. I went back to my calibration and all the analysis I had done, but it was real and it was new, and we still don’t understand to this day what it is. This is, this is why I love working with MeerKAT so much. These new telescopes are incredible.
[00:17:43] Jacinta: Absolutely. So the first time I saw that image. I thought, ah, it’s just what we call RFI like Radio Frequency Interference from, I don’t know, a satellite or something wrong with the data or something. But yeah, the more I looked into it, I was like, wait, that is real.
[00:17:57] Mpati: Yeah, that was my first thought as well. I thought I must have made a mistake somewhere. I did something wrong. I didn’t flag the radio interference so well. I didn’t calibrate so well. So I, I need to go back. I need to go back, ask people what could be the problem, what could I have done wrong? But yeah, it turned out to be real.
[00:18:17] And, they’re fascinating at first, glance, you, you just see another radio galaxy with jets, which we know of, we’ve seen. But yeah, upon closer look upon closer inspection, you have these incredible, incredible long filaments connecting these lobes. And, yeah, I’m actually so excited. I’m still trying to figure out or trying to understand what they are, and you know, with the work that we do with collaborators hopefully soon we’ll know what they are.
[00:18:43] Jacinta: Definitely, and so this is also part of my research field and, and yeah, I’d like to know as well because like it could kind of change everything we know about the physics of these objects.
[00:18:52] Mpati: It could, it could because, I mean how are they formed? What mechanisms are behind these filaments? Do we see them often? In which environments do we see them? In which kinds of galaxies do we – do we see them? It’s just amazing. There’s just so much that we still don’t know about, about the universe and, these telescopes are just blowing our minds.
[00:19:15] Jacinta: That press release went massive all over the world, but that’s not even your main area of focus. So you became really well known with this radio galaxy, but actually you usually study hydrogen gas in galaxies and how their environments ,like , the neighborhood in which they live in terms of like how close to other galaxies you usually concentrate on on that and how that impacts the hydrogen gas and how that changes the galaxy, right?
[00:19:42] Mpati: Yes, yes I do. So hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe in space, and it’s the first ingredient you need if you’re going to form stars and you’re a galaxy, of course. And so I study how the environment in which these galaxies live in affects their H one gas and how that eventually goes onto forming stars or not forming stars.
[00:20:04] What kind of effects are occurring in these environments? That are, are causing the properties of this gas to change, to collapse, to form stars and not to form stars, basically how galaxies live and eventually die.
[00:20:19] Jacinta: Okay? So if, if you have no hydrogen gas in a galaxy, then you can’t form stars, right?
[00:20:24] Mpati: If you don’t have hydrogen in the galaxies, you’re not forming stars. So no gas, no stars.
[00:20:29] Jacinta: Okay that makes it very clear. All right, and so why would the environment of the galaxies change how much gas they have and how much stars they form?
[00:20:39] Mpati: Well, hydrogen gas is quite the fuse, it’s fluffy, and so it’s easily affected by the environment, by the interactions that occur between the galaxies themselves and the galaxies with the- with the environment. And so sometimes the gas could be removed from the galaxy, and the galaxy no longer forms stars or a galaxy could undergo just a burst of star formation, where it consumes all of its star formation fuel. And so it, it becomes this bursty galaxy, which then quickly stops forming stars and becomes a red passive galaxy.
[00:21:15] And so because hydrogen has this property of being so easily affected by the intrinsic properties of the galaxies and the properties of the environment, it makes it quite a valuable gas to study if you want to truly understand how galaxy evolution takes place.
[00:21:32] Jacinta: And you gave an invited talk at this conference, a plenary talk, and you were talking about something cool called Ram pressure stripping, where you show these beautiful photos of galaxies with these massive like tails of gas coming off them. What, what are they?
[00:21:45] Mpati: This is amazing. So it’s this process where galaxies lose their outer gas discs. So imagine you are swimming in a thick soup, swimming in sea, filled with thick soup, and you’re moving very, very fast. The pressure that you will experience from that motion is what we call Ram pressure stripping it comes from fluid, fluid dynamics. And so what happens is, galaxies move in these dense soup, plasma soups called the the intercluster medium made out of hot gas. And so as they move, especially if they’re moving very, very fast, their outer regions, which mostly is gas, like hydrogen gas gets removed and they tend to form these long, beautiful, beautiful tails.
[00:22:31] And that’s how we know that these galaxies are experiencing this specific environmental effect. It is quite common in dense environment where you have many, many, many galaxies like galaxy clusters or in filaments, which are these long structures that are actually feeding the galaxy clusters. So it’s quite amazing.
[00:22:49] So if we understand how that takes place, then we’ll understand the environment in which these galaxies live in and how it affects how they eventually evolve. I, I love seeing tailed galaxies. It’s my favorite thing.
[00:23:01] Jacinta: Who knew galaxies have tails? There you go!
[00:23:03] Mpati: Right? Who knew galaxies have tails ? That’s beautiful.
[00:23:06] Jacinta: Alright, well I’d love to ask you more questions, but unfortunately we’re out of time. So thank you very much for speaking with us. Before we go, do you have any final messages for listeners?
[00:23:14] Mpati: Well just, astronomy is amazing, South Africa is an incredible place to start studying astronomy, the skies are beautiful. Go outside, look up. You will see some amazing things. And yeah, just stay curious.
[00:23:27] Jacinta: Awesome. Thank you so much Mpati.
[00:23:28] Mpati: Thank you very much for having me here, you finally got me!
[00:23:30] Jacinta: Yay!
[00:23:31] Mpati: I also like to have finally made it.
[00:23:34] Jacinta: See ya.
[00:23:34] Mpati: Bye.
[00:23:35] Tshia: Oh wow. That was really a nice interview and I think it’s quite exciting that as much as there are things that we know in the universe, there’s still so much that’s unknown. And I think with Mpati finding these filaments, we get to see that she found something that we didn’t know, and we still don’t understand what it is today, but it opens up a world of more curiosity for us to do…
[00:23:56] Jacinta: yes
[00:23:56] Tshia: …more stuff.
[00:23:56] Jacinta: Yes, absolutely. It’s just this is the adventure, right? Of exploring the universe and we can’t get into spaceships and go and actually explore. So I like to say that these telescopes are our, our vessel that we take on our discovery, like our voyage of discovery in the universe and these are the cool things, the unknown unknowns, the things that we didn’t build the telescope. To detect because they didn’t, we didn’t know they existed. And like now we, we’ve detected new things and we’re gonna keep, keep doing this. Especially as like the SKA, the Square Kilometer Array telescope gets built in South Africa, which is going to be, you know, many times the size of MeerKAT and it’s gonna be built also in Australia. I, I can’t use the word exciting enough, like, I know it’s, it’s almost cliche, but it really, it’s so cool. And I also really loved the line that Mpati said, “no gas, no stars”.
[00:24:42] Tshia: Yes. Actually, I also like that so much because sometimes we think that gases, you know, the H one gas exists outside of star formation and when sometimes we are like, yeah, they’re people who are working with galaxies, you know, galaxies are so much fun than stars. But well, stars exist because they’re galaxies.
[00:25:01] Jacinta: Yeah, exactly. Right?. Ooh, I like that.
[00:25:06] Tshia: So really, if there is no gas, there are no stars and, and we need those environments to exist. But also something that you just mentioned, now you’re reminding me about the need of having these telescopes, right? Because it’s just like a zoom in version of what is out there, that we can never see with our own eyes.
[00:25:24] Jacinta: Exactly. We can never see with our own eyes. Like it’s, it’s exactly like having eyes that can see different types of light. And if, you know, like bees can see in the ultraviolet, and ants can see in the infrared, I think, don’t quote me on that, but like, you know, and so if we were bees what would we see?
[00:25:39] Tshia: Yeah.
[00:25:39] Jacinta: You know, and we can use a UV telescope to see what they would see. And, and in this case, we can use a radio telescope to see this other light.
[00:25:46] Tshia: With that, we can never have enough eyes to see the universe. Right and Dr. Emanuelle talks about that with us, right? How they have changed one of the telecom dishes that, the 32 meter dish that they have in Ghana into a radio astronomy dish, and I think that’s one of the great ways to use some of the resources that we have to do the science that we need to do. But most importantly, he speaks about the science that he does as well with masers, which Jacinta will tell us what they are.
[00:26:20] Jacinta: Yes, I love that segue there. See another very good one. Yeah, basically it’s like gas and molecules in a galaxy, and then something is like stimulating it so it’s like getting excited.
[00:26:30] I’m, I think it’s by star formation, the formation of stars and the high energies involved there. And then it’s amazing. So it’s basically like a laser and the molecule that’s producing, this is called methanol. And in one of our previous episodes in the previous season, and we’ll put the link to this on the website, but we talked to Dr Marcin Glowacki and he was telling us about mega masers. So yeah, so this is like a space laser to the extreme, in, and this is caused when two galaxies are colliding. And yeah, in that case it’s a different molecule it’s called what we call hydroxyl, which is an oxygen and a hydrogen together. In this case it’s like the same thing, but it’s smaller scale within the Milky Way, for example, and the methanol molecule that gets excited and it starts to flash basically in this case. And Emanuelle’s talking about where he’s studying what he calls a periodic, methanol maser. So it’s not on all the time, it’s flashing. And I thought of like a nice analogy do you wanna hear it?
[00:27:24] Tshia: Yeah, you can tell me about the analogy now, you look excited to tell me about it so…
[00:27:28] Jacinta: Do you, do you want me to wait till after? Maybe I’ll wait till like after.
[00:27:30] Tshia: Okay, maybe till…
[00:27:31] Jacinta: Okay. Okay. Stay tuned for Jacinta’s. Amazing analogy.
[00:27:37] Tshia: With that, let’s get into the interview with Dr. Emanuelle Proven Adzuri.
[00:27:47] Jacinta: With us now we have Dr. Emanuelle Proven Adzuri from the Ghana Space Science and Technology Institute, and the Ghana Radio Astronomy Observatory. Welcome to The Cosmic Savannah, Emanuelle.
[00:27:58] Emmanuelle: Thank you.
[00:27:59] Jacinta: Can you tell our listeners a little bit about who you are, where you’re from, what you do?
[00:28:03] Emmanuelle: Okay, so my name is, Dr Emanuelle Proven Adzuri. I’m from Ghana, I’m from Accra- as in, I work in Accra, but , my village is called Near Ho on the Eastern side of Ghana. I did my undergraduate, thesis at the Kwa Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and then, I went on to do my master’s in computational engineering at the University of Ghana, the School of Nuclear Ally Sciences.
[00:28:36] Then from there I had my PhD in physics and astronomy with the University of Ghana and also University of Leeds in the UK. So my supervisor was Professor Melvin Hall- University of Leeds, and then also Dr. Shamila Goodhart, formerly of SARAO now in SKAO in South Africa. And I also had a supervisor in Ghana. So my PhD work was on the methanol masers. So I studied the variability of, I studied the periodicity of the methanol masers and methanol masers are very bright lasers far away in star forming regions. They’re like the lasers we have on earth, but just that they are microwave amplified. And that’s what I did for my PhD, and I discovered one maser that was periodic.
[00:29:32] Jacinta: Okay, so you studied space lasers for your PhD?
[00:29:36] Emmanuelle: Yes, great.
[00:29:37] Jacinta: Okay, no big deal. That’s just super cool. Okay, so these are in star forming regions. So they’re in in the Milky Way and where there’s big clouds forming lots and lots of stars, and then they can somehow like create lasers.
[00:29:52] Emmanuelle: Yes, that’s, that’s right.
[00:29:53] Jacinta: I guess quite complicated the details.
[00:29:55] Emmanuelle: Yeah, kind of. But, as you work with it all the time, it doesn’t look complicated again. And, there are a lot of, star forming regions with this methanol masers phenomenon. In fact, there are many molecules you could detect, but our dish in Ghana could detect methanol, which is very good. And then I also work with the-, that radio telescope in Haartebeesthoek. That’s a 26 meter radio telescope. That’s what I use for my PhD work. And after that I’ve been back in Ghana working with the newly refurbished 30 meter radio telescope.
[00:30:31] Jacinta: Alright, so there’s a lot of stuff there. We’re gonna talk about those telescopes in a second ’cause that’s very exciting. But first I wanted to know what is periodicity when we’re talking about masers?
[00:30:39] Emmanuelle: Oh, so periodicity is you having a flare at a periodic time. So you have a flare maybe every 30 days, and then that flare comes down, then it rises up again the next 30 days. Then that flare comes down, and then that- So the methanol maser that I worked on that is G323-0.459, that one was periodic every 92 days. So every 92 days you see a flare. Or I could just put it this way, you see maybe an intensity in the fire. That’s how I could just describe it. Maybe you put in some foil or firewood in the fire and every 92 days the fire goes way up and it comes down. Yeah, that’s, that’s just the simple way I could put it.
[00:31:29] Jacinta: Yeah. Cool. So it’s kind of like the fire from the space laser is getting brighter once every 90 days.
[00:31:35] Emmanuelle: Yes, that’s right.
[00:31:36] Jacinta: Very cool. Do you know what’s causing it?
[00:31:38] Emmanuelle: There are many school of thoughts. Some could be material getting onto the accretion disc, and that is what makes it bright every 92 days. Or sometimes it could also be from other causes in the environments of those, star forming regions.
[00:31:55] Jacinta: Okay. So just weird stuff going on in, in regions where there’s stars forming. Okay, so you mentioned these are the telescopes. So let’s start with the, the new one in Ghana. Tell us about that.
[00:32:06] Emmanuelle: Great. So we have a new telescope in Ghana. It used to be a telecom dish that was abandoned when fiber optic internet came. It’s in Accra just about 20 kilometers from the heart of Accra. So it’s on a highway called the Kumasi Road. So Kumasi is the garden city of Ghana. Very beautiful city, so if you live in Accra and you are going to Kumasi, it’s on that road just about 20 kilometers from the heart of Accra.
[00:32:34] This telescope has been refurbished through the generosity of South Africa and the UK and many other partners. They started refurbishing it, from 2012/2013. A lot of engineering work went into it- mechanical. They have to refurbish some of the parts that were broken because it was not in use from 2000 to 2012.
[00:33:01] Some of the parts rusted due to the environment, and then we had to replace the electronics. So new electronics components were built. Engineers from South Africa led and taught those in Ghana how to do it. And, it was an incredible experience and a lot of science- scientists also were trained on how to use a telescope. How to reduce the data and how to make sense out of the data.
[00:33:27] Jacinta: That’s so cool. So they took an old telecom dish and then turned it into a space telescope?
[00:33:33] Emmanuelle: Yes, that’s great, that’s great. And it was a huge learning curve for us in Ghana, and I’ll say that we are eternally grateful to South Africa for, for helping us do that because many of us, were nowhere near astronomy in 2010, 2012, but with this coming on board of these projects, actually this project is part of what is called the AVN.
[00:33:56] So the AVN is a project in which South Africa co-opted eight other African countries to be part of the SKA bigger project so that they’ll build a human capacity in these African countries and then also train a lot of people so that when the SKA project is finally ready, we have a lot of people to use the data, a lot of people to make brilliant science out of the data. So Ghana is actually the first country in the AVN to have their dish working. And these dishes, 32 meter in diameter, very huge.
[00:34:28] Jacinta: 32 meters? That’s massive!
[00:34:31] Emmanuelle: Yes. 32 meters bigger than HaartRAO. HaartRAO was 26 meters. And then, ours is 32 meters, so that’s when we have more collecting area. And that means that we could do more science from there, yeah.
[00:34:44] Jacinta: That’s cool. So HaartRAO, that was the single dish radio telescope in South Africa, is that right?
[00:34:49] Emmanuelle: Yes. HaartRAO was single dish and it’s also single dish, not as massive as MeerKAT, but when we have other African countries. Coming together and we have the AVN and that’s the African VLBI network. That will become a very brilliant, sensitive instrument.
[00:35:05] Jacinta: That’s awesome. So the plan is to refurbish old telecoms satellite dishes into telescopes or build new telescopes in these different African countries in order to connect them all together via a computer to create a very powerful radio telescope in the future.
[00:35:23] Emmanuelle: Yes, that’s right.
[00:35:24] Jacinta: And that’s so exciting for Ghana that they’ve got the first one.
[00:35:26] Emmanuelle: Yes. It’s exciting for us in Ghana that we have the first telescope within the AVN. That’s apart from HaartRAO then we have Ghana now, and then also we are also get to join EVN observations soon, this 2024, we’ve already had fringe tests with the European VLBI in 2017, and the results are very good and promising. And then now that we are about to finish all the works on the dish in 2024, we are going to do those fringe test again, and then we will be ready to participate in EVN. And that will also make the EVN more sensitive because we are filling the gap now in the arrays and then, that will make the images also brighter.
[00:36:11] Jacinta: That’s cool. Is that because of the position of where Ghana is?
[00:36:14] Emmanuelle: Yes. So Ghana is somehow on, on the equator, just just around five degrees above the equator. And if you connect from South Africa through Ghana to Europe, that makes the baselines better.
[00:36:27] Jacinta: So Cool. And what is this telescope? Is it being used at the moment for anything?
[00:36:31] Emmanuelle: Yes, it’s being used we’ve started observations. We did some methanol masers this year, 2023, and then also we also observed some process way back from years before Covid. We were observing process and then some AGN also. We are gonna start doing those ones. We also do regularly observe some continuous sources like Sagittarius A.
[00:36:58] Jacinta: Like the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way.
[00:37:00] Emmanuelle: Yes, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right.
[00:37:03] Jacinta: That’s really awesome. I had no idea that that massive dish existed in Ghana. So thank you so much for telling us this story. It sounds like there’s a really exciting future for yourself and everyone in Ghana in in terms of astronomy. It’s just up and coming. Do you have any final messages for listeners, particularly those in Ghana who might be listening, who might be interested in getting involved in astronomy?
[00:37:23] Emmanuelle: Yes, I, I say that the work that we are doing in Ghana cannot be done by only few of us. We want a lot of young people, brilliant young people, to join the crusade because the SKAO is really big and exciting. There are a lot of spaces for scientists and engineers in the SKAO. So through this telescope in Ghana, we want to see a lot of young people. And if you’re in Ghana, I want you to visit our site. It is just at Kuntunse Satellites Junction. So if you’re heading from, Amasaman then you’re just close to that place. Come visit us, see what are we doing there you can bring your kids we explain to them what is happening, and then also we want a lot of collaborations so that we can keep more students being trained so that the astronomy committee in Ghana can be really big and then we can have a lot of good prospect come in.
[00:38:14] Jacinta: Yeah, well, good luck and congratulations for everything you’ve achieved so far and all the best for the future.
[00:38:20] Emmanuelle: Thank you so much Dr. Jacinta. I’m grateful for this interview. Thank you very much.
[00:38:31] Tshia: Oh, that was such a nice interview. It was really a great interview. Do you wanna tell us about your analogy? Thank you.
[00:38:38] Jacinta: Yes. Okay. So Emanuelle was using the analogy of a fire, right? A fire that suddenly gets really bright and I was thinking, you know, fairy lights like on a Christmas tree or something.
[00:38:48] Tshia: Mm-Hmm. I see those
[00:38:49] Jacinta: And yeah, and so you can have them, like, you can press the button and change the…
[00:38:52] Tshia: the colors?
[00:38:53] Jacinta: Yeah, we can change, yeah, the state of these lights, right?
[00:38:56] Tshia: Yeah.
[00:38:56] Jacinta: So sometimes you can have it just like steady on, right? And it’s just on all the time and it’s just staying there. But sometimes you can have, I think there’s like flash or something. It goes like *pew pew pew* flashes on and off and it’s terrible. So never use, never use that setting. I don’t know what you’re doing. If you’re using that setting, why does it even exist? But the better one is like fade, slow fade, right? So it’s like slow fade on and then slow fade off. And that’s like the periodicity of this methanol maser is, it’s slowly fading on, it’s on for a while and then it’s slowly fading off and it’s off for a while and it takes, I think, Emanuelle was saying something like 92 days or something to, to go all the way on and then all the way off again .
[00:39:31] Tshia: That is really a cool analogy.
[00:39:33] Jacinta: Oh, thanks.
[00:39:34] Tshia: I’ll never look at Christmas trees the same again.
[00:39:36] Jacinta: Methanol masers…. yeah.
[00:39:38] Tshia: And I’ll also like to mention that I’ve actually spent some time at the HaartRAO observatory.
[00:39:43] Jacinta: Ooh, have you?
[00:39:44] Tshia: Yes, I have.
[00:39:44] Jacinta: Tell me all about it. I dunno anything about it. What is HaartRAO? And like, tell us what that is.
[00:39:48] Tshia: Okay, so HaartRAO is the. Haartebeest- I think it’s Haartebeest, it’s an Afrikaans name that I can’t pronounce fully. So Haartebeesthoek, and during my master’s, because, part of my master’s was looking into stars evolution, so I might have forgotten his name now, but then there was an astronomer there who was following some region for star formation, and I went there to spend some time with him there. So there’s one big radio dish, I think it’s 64 meters.I’m not sure. I, I’m not sure about how big it is.
[00:40:21] Jacinta: But Is it really big?
[00:40:22] Tshia: It’s big.
[00:40:23] Jacinta: Oh, it’s really big.
[00:40:24] Tshia: I mean, at that time it was one of the biggest things I’ve ever seen because I hadn’t seen SALT. This was 2015,2016. And yeah, it was really big. This one big dish almost looks like what the MeerKAT telescope looked like. But bigger there. So yeah, I spent some time there, like a week and a half. And you know, it’s just learning a little bit more about how they are following up with this region and how they’re seeing the spike to tell that there’s something happening there.
[00:40:50] Jacinta: Oh, cool. I didn’t know you did your master’s on star formation. That’s cool.
[00:40:53] Tshia: I did!
[00:40:55] Jacinta: You, you feel like this is your dirty little secret Tshia?
[00:40:59] Tshia: No! And it was like Haartebeest was so nice. It was, it was really beautiful. There were monkeys around, really small monkeys. Always just jumping around. So, you know, the warning is, you know, keep your door closed.
[00:41:12] Jacinta: Ah, where, where is this?
[00:41:13] Tshia: It’s in Gauteng, so it’s in a few kilometers outside of Johannesburg. So if you are going to probably Lanseria airport. You pass through Lanseria airport, so I think about maybe a few kilometers after that, that’s where it is.
[00:41:29] Jacinta: Yeah.
[00:41:30] Tshia: I mean, I’m not really great with directions on. All I know is that. It is when you’re going the north side of Johannesburg.
[00:41:38] Jacinta: Okay.
[00:41:38] Tshia: So yeah, like leaving the central Johannesburg going that way.
[00:41:42] Jacinta: Okay.
[00:41:42] Tshia: So yeah, so if you’re on your way to like Magaliesburg and places like that, that’s really nice. There’s still places with low light pollution. Not a lot is going on there. Yeah. And there are like. What do you call these things again? The… game? Game-.
[00:41:57] Jacinta: Game drive?
[00:41:57] Tshia: Game reserves!
[00:41:58] Jacinta: Oh, game reserves.
[00:41:58] Tshia: Yeah. There also those things around, and that’s why I think there were a lot of monkeys.
[00:42:02] Jacinta: Ah, cool. But this is not an optical telescope? This is a radio telescope.
[00:42:05] Tshia: It’s a radio telescope, it’s Haartebeesthoek Radio Observatory. So that’s why it was called HaartRAO.
[00:42:12] Jacinta: Oh! Haart-R-A-O.
[00:42:13] Tshia: Yeah.
[00:42:13] Jacinta: Okay.
[00:42:14] Tshia: HaartRAO.
[00:42:14] Jacinta: Cool.
[00:42:15] Tshia: And then, now converted to also be part of SARAO as well.
[00:42:18] Jacinta: So is it still in operation?
[00:42:20] Tshia: I think so… I think there’s one- there are few people who were based there who were at the NASSP 20, who are actually based at HaartRAO.
[00:42:29] Jacinta: Okay.
[00:42:29] Tshia: Yeah.
[00:42:29] Jacinta: Cool.
[00:42:30] Tshia: Anyway, so I just wanted to mention that, you know, when he mentioned about converting the telecom and probably trying to connect it with the HaartRAO and other radio telescopes really connecting to what James was saying about the V-L-I-B….
[00:42:43] Jacinta: The V-L-B-I! Yeah. Very Long baseline Interferometry.
[00:42:47] Tshia: Yes.
[00:42:48] Jacinta: And what Proven was mentioning too.
[00:42:49] Tshia: Yes and Proven also mentioned it too, and I thought, oh no, I’ve actually been to this place, you know?
[00:42:53] Jacinta: Oh, cool.
[00:42:54] Tshia: In my past life.
[00:42:55] Jacinta: Do you have a photo of yourself there?
[00:42:57] Tshia: I don’t know. I’ll, I have to check.
[00:42:59] Jacinta: Yeah.
[00:42:59] Tshia: Funny thing is, my master’s supervisor visited Cape Town a week ago. Yeah, I think it was a week ago now and he literally just surprised me. He just like knocked on my office door and I was just like, who’s this? But he’s retired now and living his best life and was in Cape Town for some advisory board committee thing, and yeah, he just came to say hi. And that’s why I was- when I listen to this, it’s just like, what a coincidence, because I, that, yeah.
[00:43:25] Jacinta: Cool. Shout out to him. What’s his name?
[00:43:26] Tshia: Tony Leard.
[00:43:27] Jacinta: Cool.
[00:43:28] Tshia: Hi, Tony.
[00:43:31] Jacinta: Cool. All right. Anyway, so I think we should probably wrap up the episode now.
[00:43:35] Tshia: Yes.
[00:43:35] Jacinta: What was a few short interviews is probably ending up to a long episode now. We’ve chatted for ages, but that’s okay. So if listeners are still listening, we can end with our usual thing. How are you Tshiamiso?
[00:43:46] Tshia: I’m okay, I’m okay recovering from swimming, but I’m going swimming again, so I’m excited about that. That is my hobby on the website.
[00:43:54] Jacinta: Good on you.
[00:43:56] Tshia: Uh, but generally I’m fine. Like I said in the previous episodes, I’m working on things based on when the deadline is because there’s just too many things happening. We are about six weeks away from…
[00:44:09] Jacinta: oh my goodness…
[00:44:09] Tshia: …from the GA so that’s also something else. And I’m also gonna be part of Black in Astro Week.
[00:44:17] Jacinta: Oh, cool.
[00:44:17] Tshia: Kind of like a full week of festivities around people and people of color in astronomy and just highlighting some of the things that they do. So far, it’s really been a good week. It was so interesting that it really fell on such important dates, even for, South African history. It started on the 16th of June and 16th of June is the Youth Day in South Africa, celebrating and commemorating 1976.
[00:44:43] Jacinta: And for our international listeners, what was that?
[00:44:46] Tshia: In 1976, on June the 16th, the students in Soweto went to the streets, you know, protesting and marching. Right. It was not even a protest, it was really a march against the apartheid regime at that time, which was forcing students to learn everything in Afrikaans. And so students you know said, nope, this is enough we cannot continue doing this. And that whole march has really kind of changed the full landscape of how education is done in South Africa.
[00:45:18] Jacinta: Wow.
[00:45:18] Tshia: Yeah. So it’s quite an important…
[00:45:20] Jacinta: yeah, it’s a very auspicious day to start this week.
[00:45:23] Tshia: And in America, you know, it’s celebrations of Juneneenth?
[00:45:26] Jacinta: Juneteenth.
[00:45:27] Tshia: Juneteenth, yes. Juneteenth. You know, the celebration of slaves being freed. Yeah, something along those lines. You know, the, the freedom of slavery when Lincoln became the then president and, you know, put in law that, you know, people should not be slaves anymore.
[00:45:43] Jacinta: Yeah.
[00:45:44] Tshia: So I, I thought it was really great. That we had that celebration and also just highlighting then like in Astro Scientist and so that’s something that’s happening this week and I’m gonna join them and I’m gonna be in the panel speaking about astronomy for the culture.
[00:45:58] Jacinta: Very cool.
[00:45:59] Tshia: Yes. I have to prepare for that.
[00:46:00] Jacinta: Okay. Well maybe if there’s any videos or something of this, we can link to it or photos. Maybe a photo.
[00:46:06] Tshia: Maybe photos. Okay. I’ll get some photos.
[00:46:08] Jacinta: Nice. We’ll have fun. That sounds awesome.
[00:46:09] Tshia: Thanks. And how are you, Jacinta?
[00:46:11] Jacinta: I’m okay. I’m leaving for the UK tomorrow, so a lot to get done before then. Freaking out a little bit, but in general I’m good. Just yeah, actually, as I say on the website, playing with my dog, I’m doing an online dog training course. And so I am trying to, yeah, I’m trying to like train him properly.
[00:46:30] Tshia: Oh, okay.
[00:46:30] Jacinta: Yeah.
[00:46:30] Tshia: Okay, so you’re, you’re learning how to train him?
[00:46:33] Jacinta: Yeah, exactly.
[00:46:34] Tshia: Okay, so you’re taking a course on training him.
[00:46:36] Jacinta: Yeah, exactly.
[00:46:38] Tshia: Interesting.
[00:46:38] Jacinta: Yeah, it’s, it’s working. It’s actually, it’s really good. It’s with this lady called Susan Garrett and she’s like, I dunno, Canadian. And she’s like very, very good and has won all of the like international championships on dog agility and stuff. I don’t know. Anyway. But yeah, Sam’s been a little bit sick lately, so. It’s taken up some time to look after the poor lil’ fella. And you know, I don’t have, you know, sort of a family or kids of my own. And so this is my little, my little child, my little baby. And I’m just like, oh my gosh. How do people look after human children?
[00:47:06] Tshia: Yeah.
[00:47:06] Jacinta: It’s so hard.
[00:47:08] Tshia: I cannot imagine.
[00:47:09] Jacinta: It’s so hard. Like hats off to moms and dads all over the world, like wow. What an amazing job you’re doing.
[00:47:15] Tshia: You would be clapping hands for Dan if he was here.
[00:47:18] Jacinta: Yes. Yes, exactly. Dan. Dan. There you go. There’s your round of applause, Dan. Alright, I think that’s enough for today.
[00:47:26] Tshia: Yeah. Thanks Jacinta.
[00:47:28] Jacinta: Thank you, Tshia.
[00:47:29] Tshia: Thank you very much for listening, and we hope you’ll join us again for the next episode of The Cosmic Savannah.
[00:47:34] Jacinta: You can visit our website, thecosmicsavannah.com, we’ll have the transcript, links, pictures, and other stuff related to today’s episode.
[00:47:41] Tshia: You can follow us on X, Facebook and Instagram @cosmicsavannah. That’s savannah spelled S-A-V-A-N-N-A-H. You can also find us on YouTube where audio only episodes are uploaded with closed captions, which can be auto translated into many different languages, including Afrikaans, IsiXhosa and IsiZulu.
[00:47:59] Jacinta: Special thanks today to Dr. Mpati Ramatsoku and Dr. Emanuelle Proven Adzuri for speaking with us.
[00:48:05] Tshia: Thanks to our audio editor Jacob Fine, our podcast manager, Francois Campher, our social media manager, Sumari Hatting. Abigail Thambiran for transcription, Shemin for website updates. Emil Meintjes for video creation and to the whole Cosmic Savannah volunteer team.
[00:48:21] Jacinta: Thanks also to Mark Wahlnut for music production. Brian Masemola and Mija Wojcik for photography. Kyle Jones for Astro Photography and Susie Carris for graphic design.
[00:48:29] Tshia: We grateful, acknowledge, support from the South African National Research Foundation, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory, the South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement, the South African Astronomical Observatory and the University of Cape Town’s Astronomy Department.
[00:48:42] Jacinta: You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and we’d really appreciate it if you could rate and review us and recommend us to a friend. We’ll speak to you next time on The Cosmic Savannah.
