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Published February 15, 2013 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

VAST: An ASKAP Survey for Variables and Slow Transients

Abstract

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) will give us an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the transient sky at radio wavelengths. In this paper we present VAST, an ASKAP survey for Variables and Slow Transients. VAST will exploit the wide-field survey capabilities of ASKAP to enable the discovery and investigation of variable and transient phenomena from the local to the cosmological, including flare stars, intermittent pulsars, X-ray binaries, magnetars, extreme scattering events, interstellar scintillation, radio supernovae, and orphan afterglows of gamma-ray bursts. In addition, it will allow us to probe unexplored regions of parameter space where new classes of transient sources may be detected. In this paper we review the known radio transient and variable populations and the current results from blind radio surveys. We outline a comprehensive program based on a multi-tiered survey strategy to characterise the radio transient sky through detection and monitoring of transient and variable sources on the ASKAP imaging timescales of 5 s and greater. We also present an analysis of the expected source populations that we will be able to detect with VAST.

Additional Information

© 2013 Astronomical Society of Australia; published by Cambridge University Press. Received May 21, 2012; Accepted July 29, 2012; Online Publication February 15, 2013. We would like to acknowledge the additional contributors to the optical transient classification work, including Ashish Mahabal, Ciro Donalek, Matthew Graham, Baback Moghaddam, Mike Turmon, and a number of Caltech students. We would also like to thank Peter Ashwell and Andrew Naoum at the University of Sydney for useful discussions. We acknowledge the contribution of the wider VAST collaboration team members through their participation in the design study over the last three years. This research has been supported in part by the Australian Research Council (ARC). TM, BMG, PJH, JB, and MEB acknowledge support through grants FS100100033 and DP110102034, and through the Science Leveraging Fund of the New South Wales Office for Science and Medical Research. SAF is the recipient of an ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship, DP110102889. TM, BMG, and S. Croft acknowledge funding from the University of Sydney International Program Development Fund. The Centre for All-sky Astrophysics is an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence, funded by grant CE110001020. S. Chatterjee acknowledges support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) through the award AST-1008213. DLK was partially supported by NSF awards AST-1008353 and AST-0908884. SGD acknowledges partial support from the NSF grants AST-0407448, AST-0909182, and IIS-1118041, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) grant 08-AISR08-0085. IHS is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant. A portion of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. US Government sponsorship is acknowledged.

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Published - S1323358012000069a.pdf

Submitted - 1207.1528v1.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 24, 2023