Center for Astrophysics Research and Technologies Seminar Series
Studying Meteor Radio Afterglows with the Long Wavelength Array
Presented by Savin Varghese (UNM)
Meteoroid particles from the solar system enter the Earth's atmosphere at high velocities, ablate due to friction producing meteors and an associated turbulent plasma trail along with it. Some of these bright plasma trails produce radio emission between 20-60 MHz known as the meteor radio afterglows (MRAs) and they were first detected in 2014 using the first station of Long Wavelength Array, LWA1 located at Central New Mexico. Follow-up observations with LWA1 and LWA-SV, the second station located at Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge have revealed several interesting properties of the radio emission. Even though different mechanisms have been proposed, the emission mechanism is still a mystery.
Currently a new broadband imager is running continuously in LWA-SV which can image the whole sky every 5 seconds with a bandwidth up to 20 MHz. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss on how the broadband imager is used to collect the spectrum of meteor radio afterglows and study their spectral properties.
The Owens Valley Long Wavelength Array situated in California operates within the LWA frequency range and utilizes the LWA antennas up to maximum baseline lengths of 1.5 km. This provides higher angular resolution images of the sky compared to the 100 m maximum baseline offered by LWA1 and LWA-SV. In the last part of the talk, I will talk about the data reduction methods and transient search pipeline used to obtain high resolution observations of MRAs from the Owens Valley LWA data.
2:00 pm, Thursday, May 7, 2020
Zoom,
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