Center for Astrophysics Research and Technologies Seminar Series
Monitoring the Long Wavelength Transient Sky with the LWA1 Telescope
Presented by Ken Obenberger, UNM
Radio transient astronomy has received a vastly increasing amount of interest within the last few decades. In this time, several new sources have been discovered and many more have been predicted. These sources are spread though out the radio spectrum, and many emit strongly within the low frequency (10 - 100 MHz) regime. The LWA1 telescope is a compact array of 260 dual polarization dipole antennas operating between 10 and 88 MHz. With good sensitivity, high time and frequency resolution, and an instantaneous field of view up to - 20,000 deg2, the LWA1 an ideal instrument for searching for transient phenomena. This thesis presents transient work done with the LWA1, which includes a search for prompt emission from GRBs as well as a blind search for unspecific transients. These searches resulted in new limits on astronomical transients and the discovery of radio emission from large meteors (fireballs). This thesis also presents a highly sensitive followup study on the fireball emission, which has yielded new insight into the origin of the emission, suggesting that it is emission of plasma waves within the plasma trail.
2:00 pm, Thursday, September 17, 2015
PAIS-2540, PAIS
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