Observations of Near-Earth Optical Transients with the Lomonosov Space Observatory
V. M. Lipunov, E. S. Gorbovskoy, V. G. Kornilov, V. V. Chazov, M. I. Panasyuk, S. I. Svertilov, I. V. Yashin, V. L. Petrov, V. V. Kallegaev, A. A. Amelushkin, D. M. Vlasenko
备注：
10 pages, 5 figures, published in Astronomy Reports
发表信息：
ISSN 1063-7729, Astronomy Reports, 2018, Vol. 62, No. 7, pp. 426-435. c Pleiades Publishing, Ltd., 2018
The results of observations with the MASTER-SHOK robotic wide-field optical cameras onboard the Lomonosov Space Observatory carried out in 2016 are presented. In all, the automated transient detection system transmitted 22 181 images of moving objects with signal-to-noise ratios greater than 5 to the Earth. Approximately 84% of these images are identified with well-known artificial Earth satellites (including repeated images of the same satellite) and fragments of such satellites (space debris), according to databases of known satellites. The remaining 16% of the images are relate to uncatalogued objects. This first experience in optical space-based monitoring of near-Earth space demonstrates the high efficiency and great potential of using large-aperture cameras in space, based on the software and technology of the MASTER robotic optical complexes (the Mobile Astronomical System of TElescope-Robots (MASTER) global network of robotic telescopes of Lomonosov Moscow State University).
Earth-Projected Clustering of Historical Optical Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey-I (POSS-I)
Vanderbilt University Medical Center（范德堡大学医学中心）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University（瑞典皇家理工学院和斯德哥尔摩大学）；CERIST Constantine（康斯坦丁科学文化研究与调解研究中心）；Independent Researcher（独立研究者）；Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias（加那利群岛天体物理学研究所）
Project management of the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；National Research Council Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会）；Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics（珀米特理论物理研究所）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
The Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) will be the largest and most advanced ground-based facility for gamma-ray astronomy. Several dozens of telescopes will be operated at both the Northern and Southern Hemisphere. With the advent of multi-messenger astronomy, many new large science infrastructures will start science operations and target-of-opportunity observations will play an important role in the operation of the CTAO. The Array Control and Data Acquisition (ACADA) system deployed on each CTAO site will feature a dedicated sub-system to manage external and internal scientific al…
The Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector (CHORD) is a next-generation radio telescope, proposed for construction to start immediately. CHORD is a pan-Canadian project, designed to work with and build on the success of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). It is an ultra-wideband, "large-N, small-D" telescope, consisting of a central array of 512x6-m dishes, supported by a pair of distant outrigger stations, each equipped with CHIME-like cylinders and a 64-dish array. CHORD will measure the distribution of matter over a huge swath of the Universe, det…
Machine Learning Supports Existence of Previously Unrecognized Transient Astronomical Phenomena in Historical Observatory Images
Vanderbilt University Medical Center（范德堡大学医学中心）；Independent Researcher（独立研究者）；Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias（加那利群岛天体物理研究所）；Nordita, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University（诺迪塔，皇家理工学院和斯德哥尔摩大学）
The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is a wide-field telescope project focused on detecting optical counterparts to gravitational-wave sources. Each GOTO robotic mount holds eight 40 cm telescopes, giving an overall field of view of 40 square degrees. As of 2022 the first two GOTO mounts have been commissioned at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, Canary Islands, and construction of the second node with two additional 8-telescope mounts has begin at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. Once fully operational each GOTO mount will be netwo…
Overview of the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio Transient Detector (CHORD) Project
West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）；University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；INAF – Istituto di Radioastronomia（意大利国家天体物理研究所射电天文研究所）；Rhodes University（罗德斯大学）；South African Radio Astronomy Observatory（南非射电天文台）；Queen’s University（女王大学）；University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus（不列颠哥伦比亚大学奥肯那根校区）；Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto（多伦多大学邓普天文学与天体物理学研究所）；David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto（多伦多大学大卫·A·邓普克天文学与天体物理学系）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学安东·潘内库克天文学研究所）；ASTRON, Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy（荷兰射电天文研究所ASTRON）
The limiting temporal resolution of a time-domain survey in detecting transient behavior is set by the time between observations of the same sky area. We analyze the distribution of visit separations for a range of Vera C. Rubin Observatory cadence simulations. Current simulations are strongly peaked at the 22 minute visit pair separation and provide effectively no constraint on temporal evolution within the night. This choice will necessarily prevent Rubin from discovering a wide range of astrophysical phenomena in time to trigger rapid followup. We present a science-agnostic metric to supple…
Rapid Response Triggering for Radio Transients with the SKA Observatory
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学）；Texas Tech University（德克萨斯理工大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Curtin University（科廷大学）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）；Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC（甚长基线干涉测量欧洲研究基础设施合作组织）；ASTRON, Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy（荷兰射电天文研究所 ASTRON）；Tata Institute of Fundamental Research（塔塔基础研究所）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
The Simons Observatory: Development of a Pipeline to Detect Rapid Transients in Time-Ordered Data
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；The International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA)（国际高等研究院）；The National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN)（意大利国家核物理研究所）；The National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF)（意大利国家天体物理研究所）；The Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe (IFPU)（宇宙基础物理研究所）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；University of Milano-Bicocca（米兰比可卡大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教 Pontificia 大学）；Specola Vaticana (Vatican Observatory)（梵蒂冈天文台）
Matched Filtering for the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-Transient Detector Galaxy Search
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics；Waterloo Center for Astrophysics, University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学天体物理中心）；Queen’s University（女王大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）
The WINTER Observatory: A One-Degree InGaAs Survey Camera to study the Transient Infrared Sky
Harvard & Smithsonian（哈佛-史密森天体物理中心）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
Astronomy has entered the multi-messenger data era and Machine Learning has found widespread use in a large variety of applications. The exploitation of synoptic (multi-band and multi-epoch) surveys, like LSST (Legacy Survey of Space and Time), requires an extensive use of automatic methods for data processing and interpretation. With data volumes in the petabyte domain, the discrimination of time-critical information has already exceeded the capabilities of human operators and crowds of scientists have extreme difficulty to manage such amounts of data in multi-dimensional domains. This work i…
The Transient Double-beam Spectrograph (TDS) is designed for optical low-resolution observations of non-stationary and extragalactic sources with the 2.5-m telescope of Caucasus Mountain Observatory of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute. It operates simultaneously in a short-wavelength (360--577 nm, reciprocal dispersion 1.21 A/pixel, resolving power R=1300 with a 1 arcsec slit) and long-wavelength (567--746 nm, 0.87 A/pixel, R=2500) channels. The light is split by a dichroic mirror with a 50% transmission at 574 nm. In the "blue" channel, the automatic replacement of the grating by a grism …
We present DeepStreaks, a convolutional-neural-network, deep-learning system designed to efficiently identify streaking fast-moving near-Earth objects that are detected in the data of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a wide-field, time-domain survey using a dedicated 47 sq. deg camera attached to the Samuel Oschin 48-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California, United States. The system demonstrates a 96-98% true positive rate, depending on the night, while keeping the false positive rate below 1%. The sensitivity of DeepStreaks is quantified by the performance on the test data…
The Vera C. Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time holds the potential to revolutionize time domain astrophysics, reaching completely unexplored areas of the Universe and mapping variability time scales from minutes to a decade. To prepare to maximize the potential of the Rubin LSST data for the exploration of the transient and variable Universe, one of the four pillars of Rubin LSST science, the Transient and Variable Stars Science Collaboration, one of the eight Rubin LSST Science Collaborations, has identified research areas of interest and requirements, and paths to enable them. While our r…
The Simons Observatory (SO) will provide precision polarimetry of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using a series of telescopes which will cover angular scales from arc-minutes to tens of degrees, contain over 60,000 detectors, and observe in frequency bands between 27 GHz and 270 GHz. SO will consist of a six-meter-aperture telescope initially coupled to ~35,000 detectors along with an array of 0.5m aperture refractive cameras, coupled to an additional 30,000+ detectors. The large aperture telescope receiver (LATR) is coupled to a six-meter crossed Dragone telescope and will be 2.4m in d…
The Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon II Mission (EUSO-SPB2) is a precursor for a next generation space observatory for multi-messenger astrophysics. The EUSO-SPB2 instrument will measure PeV and EeV-scale cosmic rays, optical backgrounds that could mimic tau neutrino interactions in the Earth's limb, and search for optical signatures consistent with the upward-going candidate events that the Antarctic Impulse Transient Antenna (ANITA) reported. The payload, now in the design and fabrication stage, features a pair of optical telescopes that have 1 meter diameter ap…
The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley（德克萨斯大学里奥格兰德河谷分校）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）；National Centre for Nuclear Research（国家核研究中心）；Texas Tech University（德克萨斯理工大学）
To search for optical counterparts to gravitational waves, it is crucial to develop an efficient follow-up method that allows for both a quick telescopic scan of the event localization region and search through the resulting image data for plausible optical transients. We present a method to detect these transients based on an artificial neural network. We describe the architecture of two networks capable of comparing images of the same part of the sky taken by different telescopes. One image corresponds to the epoch in which a potential transient could exist; the other is a reference image of…
Extensice Air Shower (EAS) arrays are survey instruments able to monitor continuously all the overhead sky. Their wide field of view (about 2 sr) is ideal to complement directional detectors by performing unbiased sky surveys, by monitoring variable or flaring sources, such as AGNs, and to discover transients or explosive events (GRBs). With an energy threshold in the 100 GeV range EAS arrays are transient factories. All EAS arrays presently in operation or under installation are located in the Northern hemisphere. A new survey instrument located in the Southern Hemisphere should be a high pri…
Astronomical surveys continue to provide unprecedented insights into the time-variable Universe and will remain the source of groundbreaking discoveries for years to come. However, their data throughput has overwhelmed the ability to manually synthesize alerts for devising and coordinating necessary follow-up with limited resources. The advent of Rubin Observatory, with alert volumes an order of magnitude higher at otherwise sparse cadence, presents an urgent need to overhaul existing human-centered protocols in favor of machine-directed infrastructure for conducting science inference and opti…
New instruments sensitive to chromospheric radiation at X-ray, UV, Visible, IR, and sub-mm wavelengths have become available that significantly enhance our ability to understand the bi-directional flow of energy through the chromosphere. We describe the calibration, co-alignment, initial results, and public release of a new data set combining a large number of these instruments to obtain multi-wavelength photospheric, chromospheric, and coronal observations capable of improving our understanding of the connectivity between the photosphere and the corona via transient brightenings and wave sign…
We present a method for characterizing image-subtracted objects based on shapelet analysis to identify transient events in ground-based time-domain surveys. We decompose the image-subtracted objects onto a set of discrete Zernike polynomials and use their resulting coefficients to compare them to other point-like objects. We derive a norm in this Zernike space that we use to score transients for their point-like nature and show that it is a powerful comparator for distinguishing image artifacts, or residuals, from true astrophysical transients. Our method allows for a fast and automated way of…
PANOSETI (Pulsed All-Sky Near-infrared Optical Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) is a dedicated SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) observatory that is being designed to observe 4,441 sq. deg. to search for nano- to milli-second transient events. The experiment will have a dual observatory system that has a total of 90 identical optical 0.48 m telescopes that each have a 99 square degree field of view. The two observatory sites will be separated by 1 km distance to help eliminate false positives and register a definitive signal. We discuss the overall mechanical design of …
The Lazuli Space Observatory: Opportunities for time-domain and multi-messenger astronomy
Schmidt Sciences（施密特科学）；Texas Tech University（德克萨斯理工大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Texas Rio Grande Valley（德克萨斯里奥格兰德河谷大学）；South Texas Space Science Institute（南德克萨斯空间科学研究所）；Project Pearl, Schmidt Sciences（珍珠计划，施密特科学）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（E.O.劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
A space-based very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) programme, named as the Cosmic Microscope, is proposed to involve dual VLBI telescopes in the space working together with giant ground-based telescopes (e.g., Square Kilometre Array, FAST, Arecibo) to image the low radio frequency Universe with the purpose of unraveling the compact structure of cosmic constituents including supermassive black holes and binaries, pulsars, astronomical masers and the underlying source, and exoplanets amongst others. The operational frequency bands are 30, 74, 330 and 1670 MHz, supporting broad science areas.…
The 1.0 metre f/4 fast-slew Zadko Telescope was installed in June 2008 approximately seventy kilometres north of Perth at Yeal, in the Shire of Gingin, Western Australia. Since the Zadko Telescope has been in operation it has proven its worth by detecting numerous Gamma Ray Burst afterglows, two of these being the most distant `optical transients' imaged by an Australian telescope. Other projects include a contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to image potentially hazardous near Earth asteroids (2019), monitoring space weather on nearby stars (2019), and photometry of a transit of Satu…
In the era of multi-messenger astronomy the exploration of the early emission from transients is key for understanding the encoded physics. At the same time, current generation networks of fully-robotic telescopes provide new opportunities in terms of fast followup and sky coverage. This work describes our pipeline designed for robotic optical followup of gamma-ray bursts with the Las Cumbres Observatory network. We designed a Python code to promptly submit observation requests to the Las Cumbres Observatory network within 3 minutes of the receipt of the socket notice. Via Telegram the pipelin…
The advent of all-sky facilities, such as the Neil Gehrels Swift observatory, the All Sky Automated Search for Supernovae (ASASSN), eROSITA and Gaia has led to a new appreciation of the importance of transient sources in solving outstanding astrophysical questions. Identification and catalogue cross-matching of transients has been eased over the last two decades by the Virtual Observatory but we still lack a client capable of providing a seamless, self-consistent, analysis of all observations made of a particular object by current and historical facilities. HILIGT is a web-based interface whic…
The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is conducting a nightly public survey of all 13 TESS northern sectors in 2019-2020. ZTF will observe the portions of the current TESS sectors visible from Palomar Observatory each night. Each ZTF pointing will have one exposure each with $g$ and $r$ filters, totaling two images per night. ZTF is also making additional nightly $g$- and $r$-band observations of denser stellar regions (e.g. near the Galactic Plane) to better facilitate variability studies of Galactic objects. The limiting magnitude of the ZTF observations is $\approx$20.6 and ZTF saturates at m…
The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) Observing System (OS) is the data collector for the ZTF project to study astrophysical phenomena in the time domain. ZTF OS is based upon the 48-inch aperture Schmidt-type design Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. It incorporates new telescope aspheric corrector optics, dome and telescope drives, a large-format exposure shutter, a flat-field illumination system, a robotic bandpass filter exchanger, and the key element: a new 47-square-degree, 600 megapixel cryogenic CCD mosaic science camera, along with supporting equi…
