Variables and Slow Transients with the Murchison Widefield Array

Murchison 宽场阵列的变量和慢瞬变

• 批准号: 1412421
• 负责人: David Kaplan
• 金额: $ 23.21万
• 依托单位: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-09-01 至 2018-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1412421&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Variables; Slow; Transients; Murchison; Widefield; Variables; Slow; Transients; Murchison; Widefield

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a major new international observatory to study the low-frequency radio sky. Kaplan and Croft will develop new capabilities to observe and identify transient and variable radio sources. This will provide insight about explosive and flaring sources, from nearby stars to distant galaxies. These techniques will be necessary to maximize the scientific return from the next generation of radio telescopes. Kaplan and Croft will also introduce undergraduate students to the excitement of this growing field, both through focused, in-depth research projects with individual students, and through regular discussions with a larger group of students covering research methods, advances in the field, and large-scale participatory projects. They will continue working to increase representation of underrepresented minorities through public talks, school visits, workshops, star parties, and web materials, exploring creative ways to attract them to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers through campus-based activities and researcher visits to local schools.The Co-PIs are members of the MWA transient collaboration. They will develop tools to recover transients from deep, low-frequency radio images out of the galactic plane obtained for Epoch of Reionization (EoR) studies. They will also conduct pointed observations in the galactic plane to search for transient and variable radio counterparts to X-ray binaries, active galactic nuclei, stellar coronal sources, and previously unknown sources. Radio light curves will be released to the astronomical community. Characterizing variable sources in the background is also an important step towards extracting the redshifted 21 cm emission from the EoR images, a key project of MWA.

Murchison Widefield阵列（MWA）是研究低频无线电天空的主要新国际天文台。卡普兰（Kaplan）和克罗夫特（Croft）将开发新的功能，以观察和识别瞬态和可变无线电源。 这将提供有关爆炸性和耀斑来源的见解，从附近的恒星到遥远的星系。这些技术将是必要的，以最大程度地利用下一代射电望远镜的科学回报。卡普兰（Kaplan）和克罗夫特（Croft）还将通过与个别学生的重点，深入的研究项目以及与涵盖研究方法，领域进步和大规模参与性项目的较大的学生进行定期讨论，从而引起本科生的兴奋。他们将继续努力通过公开谈判，学校访问，研讨会，明星派对和网络材料来增加代表人数不足的少数群体，并通过基于校园的活动和研究人员访问当地学校来吸引他们进入科学，技术，工程和数学职业。 他们将开发工具以从获得电离时代（EOR）研究的银河系平面中恢复瞬态。 他们还将在银河平面上进行指向观测，以搜索与X射线二进制文件，活跃的银河核，恒星冠状动脉来源以及以前未知来源的瞬态和可变无线电对应物。 无线电曲线将发布给天文学界。 在后台表征变量源也是从EOR图像中提取红移21 cm发射的重要步骤，这是MWA的关键项目。