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The plan is to use the Carlson and White (2012) approach to remapping a simulated cube to make a“pencil beam” cuboid from which we will cut the vuvuzela volume that will be observed in, for example, the LADUMA survey planned for the MeerKAT.
Why a vuvuzela?
Neutral hydrogen (HI) emits photons at a very specific frequency (around 21cm in wavelength, a result of a hyperfine transition that flips the spin of an electron relative to the proton in hydrogen). as one moves further away form earth, the photons become redshifted due to the cosmological expansion of space. when we observe HI in distant galaxies, the HI photons have been redshifted to longer wavelengths (lower frequencies). The field of view of a radio telescope scales inversely with the frequency of observations. At 21cm (1.4GHhz), the field of view of the MeerKAT observation is about 1 square degree. At 700MHz (the frequency at which HI is observed in galaxies at redshift z~1) the field of view is more like 4 square degrees.
