Astrophysical results of the Mauritius radio telescope

Abstract

One of the first scientific justifications of building the Mauritius Radio Telescope (hereafter referred to as MRT) was to complement the Cambridge 6C survey, which is a radio map of most of the northern sky at 150 MHz [1]; the MRT would then be the equivalent of the 6C survey for the southern sky and together we would obtain a whole sky radio map at 150 MHz. When the MRT was built, there were no radio surveys of the southern sky at frequencies less than 408 MHz; the frequency of 150 MHz was also chosen to complement the other radio surveys of the southern sky, which have been done at higher frequencies. Furthermore low radio frequencies like 150 MHz are bound to see new sources that would have been missed at higher frequencies due to the form of their spectra. Interesting features of resolved objects can also be studied in more details. In this paper, a brief description of the MRT will be made as well as the observations and imaging with the MRT data, and some astrophysical results obtained since its commissioning in 1992 (20 years of existence this year 2012).