South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope array has chalked up yet another astronomical first. A team of South African and international astronomers has used MeerKAT to, for the first time, measure the neutral hydrogen gas (which is the material that forms and fuels stars) around galaxies as they were four billion years ago. (Or, in other words, galaxies that lie four billion light years from Earth.) Neutral hydrogen gas is the most abundant material in the universe. “For the first time, the team were able to measure the hydrogen gas for galaxies of different sizes and star formation activity to determine how the fuel content relates to other observable properties of galaxies four billion years in the past,” highlighted University of Cape Town eResearch Director Professor Mattia Vaccari. “These were compared to galaxies in the present day.”
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