Colloquium by Dr Oleg Smirnov

You are cordially invited to attend a colloquium by Dr Oleg Smirnov.

Title - Dynamic Imaging With MeerKAT: The Time Axis As The Final Frontier.

With the increased sensitivity and field of view of SKA pathfinders, dynamic radio imaging (imaging the time axis) is becoming a burgeoning field, yielding rich new discoveries of transients and variable sources. MeerKAT's exquisite instantaneous sensitivity (<150 uJy image rms in an 8s integration) opens up studies of variability on much shorter timescales than was possible with previous radio interferometers. This also has important implications for interferometric SETI, since any potential technosignatures would be a subset of such transient events.

At the same time, imaging at such short timescales introduces its own substantial challenges. Instrumental effects that tend to average out in a traditional long synthesis observation can become limiting for dynamic imaging if not addressed correctly. I will discuss these challenges and present MeerKAT dynamic imaging of Jupiter’s radiation belts, which has led to the serendipitous discovery of a pulsar-type object named the PARROT (pulsar with abnormal refraction recurring on
odd timescales). This result suggests that archival data must be hiding many more such objects.

This work has led to the development of (and given the name to) a more general dynamic imaging pipeline, developed in collaboration with the Breakthrough Listen initiative. The TRON pipeline is capable of detecting short-duration transients in imaging data, and generating light curves and dynamic spectra for thousands of field sources en masse. We have kicked off an effort to “mine” archival MeerKAT data with TRON, which has already yielded a number of exciting discoveries, some of which I will showcase. The longer-term plan is to develop the TRON pipeline to a state where it can be run in real-time, commensally with any MeerKAT imaging observation. This would open the door to transient event triggers -- something that has never been done with a radio interferometer before.

Join meeting here