Millimeter Transient Point Sources in the SPTpol 100 Square Degree Survey

Creators: Whitehorn, N.; Crites, A. T.; Padin, S.

Abstract

The millimeter transient sky is largely unexplored, with measurements limited to follow-up of objects detected at other wavelengths. High-angular-resolution telescopes, designed for measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), offer the possibility to discover new, unknown transient sources in this band—particularly the afterglows of unobserved gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Here, we use the 10 m millimeter-wave South Pole Telescope, designed for the primary purpose of observing the CMB at arcminute and larger angular scales, to conduct a search for such objects. During the 2012–2013 season, the telescope was used to continuously observe a 100 deg^2 patch of sky centered at R.A. 23h30m and decl. −55° using the polarization-sensitive SPTpol camera in two bands centered at 95 and 150 GHz. These 6000 hr of observations provided continuous monitoring for day- to month-scale millimeter-wave transient sources at the 10 mJy level. One candidate object was observed with properties broadly consistent with a GRB afterglow, but at a statistical significance too low (p = 0.01) to confirm detection.

Additional Information

© 2016 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2016 April 5; revised 2016 July 19; accepted 2016 July 26; published 2016 October 18. Thanks to S. Croft for helpful comments and to G. Ghirlanda for providing 150 GHz orphan afterglow predictions. The South Pole Telescope program is supported by the National Science Foundation through grant PLR-1248097. Partial support is also provided by the NSF Physics Frontier Center grant PHY-0114422 to the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Kavli Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant GBMF#947 to the University of Chicago for the construction of SPTpol. The McGill authors acknowledge funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. J.W.H. is supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. AST-1402161. B.B. is supported by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. De-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy. T.dH. is supported by the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science. The CU Boulder group acknowledges support from NSF AST-0956135. This work is also supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. Work at Argonne National Lab is supported by UChicago Argonne, LLC, Operator of Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne). Argonne, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Laboratory, is operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. We also acknowledge support from the Argonne Center for Nanoscale Materials. The data analysis pipeline uses the scientific Python stack (Hunter 2007; Jones et al. 2001; van der Walt et al. 2011) and the HDF5 file format (The HDF Group 1997). Computing for this work was conducted using resources provided by the Open Science Grid (Pordes et al. 2007), which is supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

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Published - Whitehorn_2016_ApJ_830_143.pdf

Submitted - 1604.03507v2.pdf

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