Finding New Radio Pulse Candidates With GREENBURST

Susie Paine*, Jordan Stanley*, and Duncan Lorimer
Department of Physics and Astronomy, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506

Presentation No.: 109

Assigned Category (Presentation Format): Physical Sciences (Poster Presentations)

Student’s Major: Physics with Astronomy

Bursts of radio waves mark many astrophysical phenomena, including pulsars, Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), and Rotating Radio Transients (RRATs). While pulsars are relatively well understood, both FRBs and RRATs need more data. Finding transient phenomena is often a matter of luck. A telescope needs to point at the right portion of the sky at the right time. Telescope hours are hard to get, so a more efficient strategy for acquiring observing hours is to piggyback off of other people’s observations. If someone is viewing a galaxy when a burst occurs, that burst can be examined, in addition to the intended object. GREENBURST is an instrument on the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope that analyses all radio observations to find bursts. These bursts are run through a pipeline to determine the most probable candidate events. We then matched those candidates to known pulsars, FRBs, and RRATs. So far, 30,244 candidates have been found, leading to 7,686 matches. Future work will include sorting through promising candidates that don’t have a match to discover potential new objects.

Funding: NSF Award AAG-1616042

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: the WVU Astrophysics REU (Loren Anderson)