Data coverage
MeerKAT radio telescope visibility data for the radio galaxy ESO 137-006, located in the Norma galaxy cluster (Abell 3627) at a distance of approximately 70 megaparsecs. The observations cover two frequency bands (980–1080 MHz and 1356–1440 MHz) and comprise 14 hours of on-target integration time taken in May 2019 using all 64 MeerKAT antennas. These data led to the discovery of multiple collimated synchrotron threads (CSTs) — narrow, thread-like structures of radio emission connecting the galaxy's radio lobes — a configuration not previously observed in radio galaxies (Ramatsoku et al. 2020, A&A 636, L1). The data are stored in Zarr format, implementing the CASA Measurement Set v2 data model. They are cloud-native and can be accessed directly from S3 using the dask-ms Python library without prior download. The dataset consists of three Measurement Sets: one primary calibrator and two target-field observations. Each target dataset is about 1.1TB compressed (~3TB uncompressed). A key community challenge associated with this dataset is performing distributed radio interferometric imaging (gridding, FFT, deconvolution) at scale directly on cloud storage — a workflow directly relevant to future Square Kilometre Array (SKA) pipelines.
Access & permitted use
Review the publisher’s documentation for availability, eligibility and permitted uses, including commercial analysis, model training and redistribution.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Attribution required for refereed scientific publications — please cite Ramatsoku et al. (2020), A&A 636, L1, https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202037800.
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