STARE2: Detecting Fast Radio Bursts in the Milky Way
Bochenek, Christopher D. and McKenna, Daniel L. and Belov, Konstantin V. and Kocz, Jonathon and Kulkarni, S. R. and Lamb, James and Ravi, Vikram and Woody, David (2020) STARE2: Detecting Fast Radio Bursts in the Milky Way. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 132 (1009). Art. No. 034202. ISSN 0004-6280. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20200608-103603887
PDF - Accepted Version
There are several unexplored regions of the short-duration radio transient phase space. One such unexplored region is the luminosity gap between giant pulses (from pulsars) and cosmologically located fast radio bursts (FRBs). The Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2 (STARE2) is a search for such transients out to 7 Mpc. STARE2 has a field of view of 3.6 steradians and is sensitive to 1 millisecond transients above ~300 kJy. With a two-station system we have detected and localized a solar burst, demonstrating that the pilot system is capable of detecting short duration radio transients. We found no convincing non-solar transients with duration between 65 μs and 34 ms in 200 days of observing, limiting with 95% confidence the all-sky rate of transients above ~300 kJy to <40 sky⁻¹ yr⁻¹. If the luminosity function of FRBs could be extrapolated down to 300 kJy for a distance of 10 kpc, then one would expect the rate to be ~2 sky⁻¹ yr⁻¹.
https://doi.org/10.1088/1538-3873/ab63b3 DOI Article
Bochenek, Christopher D. 0000-0003-3875-9568
Belov, Konstantin V. 0000-0002-8861-110X
Kocz, Jonathon 0000-0003-0249-7586
Kulkarni, S. R. 0000-0001-5390-8563
Ravi, Vikram 0000-0002-7252-5485
© 2020 The Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Received 2019 September 30; accepted 2019 December 18; published 2020 January 28. We would like to thank the then director of OVRO, A. Readhead, for funds (derived from the Alan Moffet Funds) which allowed us to start this project. The Presidential Director's Fund (PDF) allowed us to build the second system at Goldstone. We are thankful to Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratories for the second round of funding. We would also like to thank Sandy Weinreb and David Hodge for building the front end and back end boxes, Jeffrey Lagrange for his support at GDSCC, and the entire OVRO staff for their support. Part of the research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We would also like to thank the referee for their helpful comments.
Owens Valley Radio Observatory UNSPECIFIED
JPL President and Director's Fund UNSPECIFIED
NASA/JPL/Caltech UNSPECIFIED
Galaxy: general – instrumentation: detectors – methods: observational – radio continuum: general – Sun: radio radiation
Christopher D. Bochenek et al 2020 PASP 132 034202