| 3rd of November 2021 |
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| ATNF Colloquium |
| Commensal searches for variable radio sources with MeerKAT |
| Laura Driessen (S&A, CSIRO) |
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Abstract:
New wide-field, sensitive radio instruments are enabling us to search
and investigate the dynamic radio sky like never before. Previous
untargeted radio searches in the image plane have been limited by
small fields of view, combining observations from mismatched surveys
and instruments, and large gaps between epochs. Now instruments such
the MeerKAT, ASKAP, the Karl G. Janksy VLA, LOFAR, and the MWA are
uncovering large samples of dynamic radio sources without performing
targeted searches. ThunderKAT is the MeerKAT large science project for
searching for and investigating variable and transient radio sources
in the image plane, and has already revealed exciting results on
relativistic binaries, cataclysmic variables and more. A key part of
ThunderKAT's goals is to perform untargeted, image-plane searches for
variable and transient sources. I will present MKT J170456.2-482100,
the first transient discovered with MeerKAT, and 25 new variable radio
sources discovered with MeerKAT in the image-plane.
The Figure above shows the variability parameters for the light curves of 1080 unique radio sources (grey points) from 152 weekly observations of the GX339-4 field. The left panel shows the parameters for the unbinned light curves, and the right panel shows the parameters after binning the light curves with ten epochs per bin. The coloured markers show 25 new long-term variables and the black markers indicate the three previously known variable sources in the field. |