Fast Detection of Astronomical Impulses in Radio Interferometer Streams

• Activity Number: 485
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 7, 2013 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences
• Author(s): Scott Vander Wiel*+ and Earl Lawrence and Geoff Bower and Casey Law
• Companies: Los Alamos National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Berkeley
• Keywords: radio astronomy ; streaming data ; anomaly detection

Abstract

Bright pulses from distant objects probe the universe and are used to test General Relativity and reveal spatial variations in the extremely dilute gas between stars and galaxies. A recently discovered class of erratic and very bright pulsars adds diversity to the list of cosmic probes, but these are more difficult to detect than the regular beats of a standard pulsars.

Single-dish telescopes pioneered the study of millisecond radio transients but interferometers can provide better location accuracy, more efficient survey speeds, and more effective interference mitigation, if they can handle millisecond versions of the massive data streams used to produce images. We describe a new technique that collapses interferometric transient detection to the computational scale required of single-dish telescopes yet maintains the ability to follow up with imaging and precise source localization. The technique, based on phase closure constraints, is computationally efficient enough for real-time, all-time transient detection. A statistical extension to the technique recovers coherent information across frequency channels to substantially open the field of view and improve survey speeds.