The Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transients survey

Principal Investigators: Keith Bannister (CSIRO), Ryan Shannon (Swinburne University), Clancy James (ICRAR/Curtin University)
CRAFT is a purely commensal survey for transient sources with timescales shorter than 5 seconds. Short-timescale transients are associated with the most energetic and brightest single events in the Universe. They provide Nature’s ultimate laboratory; their emission is generated by matter under extreme conditions whose properties probe physical regimes far transcending the range achievable in terrestrial experiments. Fast timescale transients open new vistas on the physics of high brightness temperature objects, extreme states of matter and the physics of strong gravitational fields. In addition, the detection of extragalactic transients affords us an entirely new and sensitive probe on the huge reservoir of baryons in the intergalactic medium.