Postdoctoral Research Assistant in The Evolution of HI with the MIGHTEE Survey.

The MeerKAT International Giga-Hertz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration (MIGHTEE; Jarvis et al. 2016) survey, is being carried out with the 64-dish MeerKAT telescope in South Africa and it has been awarded 1900 hours of MeerKAT time over the next five years. Its central aims are to understand the evolution of galaxies by; (i) tracing their AGN and star-formation through synchrotron emission to z ∼ 6, (ii) measuring the evolution of HI in galaxies out to z ∼ 0.57, and (iii) untangle the role of magnetic fields in galaxies and the intracluster and intergalactic media. It will survey 20 deg2 of the best studied extragalactic fields (COSMOS, XMMLSS, ELAIS-S1 and E-CDFS).

With this project we will focus on the fundamental issue understanding the evolution of neutral hydrogen from the MIGHTEE survey, where we expect detect over 3000 HI galaxies to z~0.5 (>5s), and by using Bayesian stacking techniques obtain statistical measurements of the HI mass function below the nominal 5s threshold.

The PDRA will also have access to the combined deep optical and near-infrared imaging and spectroscopic surveys in these fields to investigate the environmental dependence of HI, and provide key measurements of the mechanism responsible for depleting the HI gas in galaxies.

Matt Jarvis, is the PI of the MIGHTEE survey and Ian Heywood leads the data reduction team, the PDRA will work closely with both on reducing and analysing the data, and be in position to lead the high-impact papers based on the MIGHTEE data. The PDRA will also have the opportunity to visit and spend time working with MIGHTEE team members in the MeerKAT office in Cape Town.