LADUMA Initial Results: What We Have Found So Far

by Abhisek Mohapatra (University of Cape Town)

Thursday Jun 26, 2025, 2:15 PM → 3:45 PM Europe/Berlin

D6-135 (UHG)

Understanding how galaxies form and evolve over time remains one of the central challenges in astrophysics. A crucial missing link in this picture is how the neutral hydrogen (HI) content of galaxies has changed across cosmic time, as HI serves as the primary fuel for star formation and plays a key role in the baryon cycle. With the advent of new radio facilities like the SKA pathfinders, we can now study HI in galaxies beyond the local Universe. The LADUMA (Looking at the Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array) survey is designed to study the evolution of neutral hydrogen (HI) in galaxies over cosmic time. Using deep observations from MeerKAT, LADUMA targets a single field with 300 hours in L-band (z < 0.6) and up to 3000 hours in UHF-band (0.4 < z < 1.4). From the first 127 hours of L-band data, we have directly detected HI in around 230 galaxies out to z ~ 0.5. These detections enable us to trace how HI is distributed in galaxies and how its abundance changes over time. By combining these data with existing multi-wavelength surveys, we are exploring how galaxies acquire and deplete their gas reservoirs. Our initial results provide new insights into the role of HI in galaxy evolution, highlighting LADUMA’s potential as a transformative survey for understanding the distant Universe.

2025-06-26_Mohapatra_Abhisek.pdf