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arXiv 1206.6535astro-ph.HEastro-ph.IM
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用VERITAS切伦科夫望远镜寻找快速光瞬变

Searching for Fast Optical Transients using VERITAS Cherenkov Telescopes

Sean Griffin, David Hanna, Adam Gilbert

摘要:

天文瞬变现象本质上是一个有趣的研究课题。快速光学瞬变(微秒时间尺度)是光学天文学的一个基本未开发的领域,主要是由于大型光学望远镜的超额认购。此外,大多数光学观测使用积分时间为秒级的仪器,因此无法分辨快速瞬变。然而,目前的大气切伦科夫伽马射线望远镜具有巨大的收集区域(例如,VERITAS由四个12米望远镜组成),比任何现有的光学望远镜都要大,并且通常可以在不干扰伽马射线观测的情况下进行此类研究。以下概述了使用切伦科夫望远镜检测光学瞬变的好处,以及VERITAS瞬变检测器(TRenDy)的实现,这是一种基于现场可编程门阵列的专用多通道光度计。数据展示了TrenDy探测瞬态事件的能力,如恒星通过其视野和脉冲星的光学光变曲线。

英文摘要:

Astronomical transients are intrinsically interesting things to study. Fast optical transients (microsecond timescale) are a largely unexplored field of optical astronomy mainly due to the fact that large optical telescopes are oversubscribed. Furthermore, most optical observations use instruments with integration times on the order of seconds and are thus unable to resolve fast transients. Current-generation atmospheric Cherenkov gamma-ray telescopes, however, have huge collecting areas (e.g., VERITAS, which consists of four 12-m telescopes), larger than any existing optical telescopes, and time is typically available for such studies without interfering with gamma-ray observations. The following outlines the benefits of using a Cherenkov telescope to detect optical transients and the implementation of the VERITAS Transient Detector (TRenDy), a dedicated multi-channel photometer based on field-programmable gate arrays. Data are presented demonstrating the ability of TRenDy to detect transient events such as a star passing through its field of view and the optical light curve of a pulsar.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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