An international group of scientists from Australia, Chile, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, the UK and the US as well as from South Africa, have made a major and unplanned discovery using South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope array. While searching for neutral hydrogen gas, they discovered the most remote example yet found of what is called a ‘megamaser’, a phenomenon created by the collision of two galaxies. The research team was (and will continue) looking for neutral hydrogen in a specific part of the sky, and looking for this gas in the very deep depths of the universe (or, in other words, very long ago in the past). This programme was designated ‘Looking at the Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array’, acronymed as LADUMA. (For non-South African readers, laduma is a local word, uttered as an exclamation, for scoring a goal in soccer.)
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