The Widefield ASKAP L-band Legacy All-sky Blind surveY (or WALLABY) is a major survey that is now running on the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), which is an innovative imaging radio telescope located in an extremely radio quiet zone (the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory) in Western Australia. The aim of WALLABY is to use the powerful widefield phased-array technology of ASKAP to observe most of the southern sky in the 21-cm line of neutral hydrogen (or HI) at 30-arcsec resolution, thereby detecting and imaging the gas distribution in hundreds of thousands of external galaxies in the local Universe for the first time. This will allow us to gain a much improved understanding of the processes involved in galaxy formation and evolution, and the role of stellar and black hole feedback, gas accretion and galaxy interactions in these processes. Several WALLABY fields have already been observed resulting in a rich variety of science projects (see below). Many more projects and much more data will become available with the survey starting full operations in late 2022.
The purpose of the various surveys is to understand the evolution of the Universe, the distribution of matter and the formation of galaxies and large-scale structure. Several projects are available within the WALLABY team. Contact any of ICRAR’s WALLABY researchers about WALLABY projects. A few suggested project titles and contact people are given below:
- The relationship between galaxy properties and dark matter content (Barbara Catinella)
- The search for dark galaxies (Lister Staveley-Smith)
- Young stellar populations in nearby galaxies and the Initial Mass Function of newly born stars (Gerhardt Meurer)
- The search for high velocity clouds in the local Universe (Bi-Qing For)
- The HI mass function (Tobias Westmeier)
- Detection and parameterisation algorithms (Tobias Westmeier)
- Star formation inside and outside of galaxy discs (Brent Groves)
The Australian SKA pathfinder (ASKAP) in Western Australia is one of several world-class radio telescopes being used by ICRAR researchers
