Finding Fast Radio Bursts with the Very Large Array

• Activity Number: 146
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Monday, August 4, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Imaging
• Author(s): Earl Lawrence*+ and Scott Vander Wiel
• Companies: Los Alamos National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Observatory
• Keywords: imaging ; big data ; detection ; astronomy ; interferometry

Abstract

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away something was blinking very quickly and erratically. These bursts can be used to infer details about the structure of the Universe. Recently, these bursts have been detected with a large single dish radio telescope. Radio telescope arrays, like the VLA, could be used to localize these sources more accurately and survey more quickly. However, at the required millisecond time scales, radio telescope arrays generate huge volumes of data (current VLA observing for this project produces 1 TB/hour). This talk will discuss some of the basics of radio telescope arrays, imaging at the millisecond time scale, and a new algorithm for detecting bursts that bypasses imaging and reduces computations to the level of a single dish telescope. We will discuss ongoing work at the VLA and LANL for detecting these bursts.