Speaker
Description
Recently, a new population of bright, seconds to minutes duration radio transients have been discovered, for example the long period transient discovered by de Ruiter et al. (2024). Our team developed a fast subtraction imaging pipeline to search for more of these transients in data from the LOw-Frequency ARray (LOFAR). LOFAR is undergoing a major upgrade to LOFAR2.0, which includes a new, faster, fully automated transient detection pipeline enabling us to search vast quantities of data for more of these events.
In addition, we are building a new Amsterdam ASTRON Radio Transient Facility and Analysis Center (AARTFAAC) 2.0, a whole visible sky, low frequency radio transient instrument comprising 12 LOFAR 2.0 Dutch stations (Shulevski et al. 2020). AARTFAAC 2.0 will increase the bandwidth of the original system by an order of magnitude to 30 MHz and produce whole sky images with 1 second cadence. AARTFAAC2.0 will have a ~400 TB storage buffer, which will allow for data to be stored for roughly 24 hours. Meaning, AARTFAAC2.0 will be able to provide observations of multi-messenger transients covering timescales from hours before the event to hours afterwards. This is particularly interesting as coherent, low frequency radio emission is expected prior to and following compact binary mergers (Rowlinson et al. 2019).
Beyond the application to triggering events, AARTFAAC2.0 is an excellent tool for finding transients on timescales of seconds to minutes. For example, we have detected a 30 Jy Galactic transient with several inhomogeneous pulses that have durations between 10-60 seconds.
This event, along with several other bright and long duration transients were found using the original AARTFAAC system. Considering the extensive pipeline improvements and the upgrade to AARTFAAC2.0, we expect to find more exciting transients on timescales of seconds to minutes.
| Talk category | NOVA Network 3 |
|---|---|
| PhD relevance | 1st |
