Zara Randriamanakoto Quotes

The SKA project has helped put Africa on the map of the astronomy world and this is just the beginning.

Astronomy is a discipline that requires technical skills and cutting-edge technology . And these can be used to tackle environmental challenges such as climate change or to plan the long-term response to the current famine in southern Madagascar.

I am a research astronomer at SAAO. My research interests revolve around multiwavelength observations of interacting and collisional ring galaxies to help investigate the formation and evolution mechanisms of young massive clusters. I also work on radio loud AGN to study the AGN duty cycle using deep radio continuum surveys.

The reality is that astronomy is a long-term investment, and although its benefits might not always be evident it has significant impact in many ways.

My research topics mainly revolve on multi-wavelength investigation of young massive star clusters in interacting and collisional ring galaxies. I am also interested in the life cycle of radio AGN.

The main challenges I encountered were the language barriers (switching from French to English), exposure to a diverse culture in South Africa and especially adapting to the new educational system at the University of Cape Townbwhich required a lot of self-learning, self-discipline and perseverance.

These African women who are shaking up science.

Before coming to South Africa, I had very little knowledge about astronomy. At the time, there were no such subjects at university. My knowledge of astronomy was therefore limited to what I had learned in secondary school during geography lessons and through documentaries I had watched.

It wasn't easy at first. But I persevered and now I'm used to the language of Shakespeare. I read a lot and practiced English constantly since classes, conversations with friends and colleagues and especially communication outside the university are in English. It took time. But as the famous proverb says: "Practice makes perfect.

Although my research work is currently based in South Africa, I have also been supervising M2 students in astrophysics at the University of Antananarivo since 2017.

I did my undergraduate degree in physics, then a BSc Honours in energy physics at the University of Antananarivo. I then did postgraduate studies in astronomy and astrophysics (BSc Honours, Masters and then PhD thesis) at the University of Cape Town. I obtained my PhD in astronomy in 2015. Between 2015 and 2018, I was a SKA postdoc at the same university.

Making a career in science in Africa is no longer a utopia. Believe in your dreams! But remember that there is no such thing as chance. Success does not fall from the sky.

I am the team leader of Kanty Astronomy Research Group (KARG). We are an extragalactic astronomy group affiliated with SAAO and the University of Antananarivo.

It is the IAU that has the power to say what a planet is and that decided to place Pluto in another category, that of dwarf planets. I told myself that for Madagascar to be on the world map of astronomy, we had to join such an institution

On the research side, I study young massive star clusters hosted by interacting galaxies and burning ring galaxies to study the effect of the environment on the formation and evolution mechanisms of these proto-clusters. I also search for dying and restarted radio galaxies using LOFAR and MeerKAT to better understand the life cycle of radio galaxies.