Imogen H. WhittamPrescott MatthewJarvis M.JAn, FangxiaGlowacki M.Adams N.J.2025-10-292025-10-292024Whittam, I.H., Prescott, M., Hale, C.L., Jarvis, M.J., Heywood, I., An, F., Glowacki, M., Maddox, N., Marchetti, L., Morabito, L.K. and Adams, N.J., 2024. MIGHTEE: Multi-wavelength counterparts in the COSMOS field. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 527(2), pp.3231-3245.https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad3307https://hdl.handle.net/10566/21300In this paper, we combine the early science radio continuum data from the MeerKAT International GHz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration (MIGHTEE) Survey, with optical and near-infrared data and release the cross-matched catalogues. The radio data used in this work covers 0.86 deg2 of the COSMOS field, reaches a thermal noise of 1.7 μJy beam-1 and contains 6102 radio components. We visually inspect and cross-match the radio sample with optical and near-infrared data from the hyper suprime-cam (HSC) and UltraVISTA surveys. This allows the properties of active galactic nuclei and star-forming populations of galaxies to be probed out to z ≈ 5. Additionally, we use the likelihood ratio method to automatically cross-match the radio and optical catalogues and compare this to the visually cross-matched catalogue. We find that 94 per cent of our radio source catalogue can be matched with this method, with a reliability of 95 per cent. We proceed to show that visual classification will still remain an essential process for the cross-matching of complex and extended radio sources. In the near future, the MIGHTEE survey will be expanded in area to cover a total of ∼20 deg2; thus the combination of automated and visual identification will be critical. We compare the redshift distribution of SFG and AGN to the SKADS and T-RECS simulations and find more AGN than predicted at z ∼1.enGalaxiesGalaxies: evolutionRadio continuumsurveysGalaxies: ActiveArticle