Revisiting Ideology's Role in the Sino-Soviet Split

316

181

Significant new opportunities for astrophysics and cosmology have been identified at low radio frequencies. The Murchison Widefield Array is the first telescope in the southern hemisphere designed specifically to explore the low-frequency astronomical sky between 80 and 300 MHz with arcminute angular resolution and high survey efficiency. The telescope will enable new advances along four key science themes, including searching for redshifted 21-cm emission from the EoR in the early Universe; Galactic and extragalactic all-sky southern hemisphere surveys; time-domain astrophysics; and solar, heliospheric, and ionospheric science and space weather. The Murchison Widefield Array is located in Western Australia at the site of the planned Square Kilometre Array (SKA) low-band telescope and is the only low-frequency SKA precursor facility. In this paper, we review the performance properties of the Murchison Widefield Array and describe its primary scientific objectives.

Section: Time-domain Astrophysicsmentioning

confidence: 82%

Science with the Murchison Widefield Array

Bowman

Cairns

Kaplan

et al. 2013

316

181

“…B ackend —The data recording system used for the observation. At Parkes, two primary data recording systems have been used: the analogue filterbank (AFB) and Berkeley Parkes Swinburne Recorder (BPSR; Keith et al 2010). The Mock spectrometers and the GUPPI backends have been used at Arecibo and the GBT, respectively.…”

Section: Parametersmentioning

confidence: 99%

FRBCAT: The Fast Radio Burst Catalogue

Petroff

Barr

Jameson

et al. 2016

572

588

Here we present a catalogue of known Fast Radio Burst (FRB) sources in the form of an online catalogue, FRBCAT. The catalogue includes information about the instrumentation used for the observations for each detected burst, the measured quantities from each observation, and model-dependent quantities derived from observed quantities. To aid in consistent comparisons of burst properties such as width and signal-to-noise ratios we have reprocessed all the bursts for which we have access to the raw data, with software which we make available. The originally derived properties are also listed for comparison. The catalogue is hosted online as a MySQL database which can also be downloaded in tabular or plain text format for off-line use. This database will be maintained for use by the community for studies of the FRB population as it grows.

“…The Parkes Radio Telescope (Parkes) is a 64-m telescope located in Parkes, New South Wales, Australia. Parkes operated in FRB search mode with the Multibeam receiver (Staveley-Smith et al 1996) and the BPSR backend (Keith et al 2010). The usable bandwidth is 340 MHz, in the range of 1182–1582 MHz.…”

Section: Facilities Involved In the Em Follow Up Of Gw170817mentioning

confidence: 99%

Follow Up of GW170817 and Its Electromagnetic Counterpart by Australian-Led Observing Programmes

Andreoni

Ackley

Cooke

et al. 2017

179

The discovery of the first electromagnetic counterpart to a gravitational wave signal has generated follow-up observations by over 50 facilities world-wide, ushering in the new era of multi-messenger astronomy. In this paper, we present follow-up observations of the gravitational wave event GW170817 and its electromagnetic counterpart SSS17a/DLT17ck (IAU label AT2017gfo) by 14 Australian telescopes and partner observatories as part of Australian-based and Australian-led research programs. We report early-to late-time multi-wavelength observations, including optical imaging and spectroscopy, midinfrared imaging, radio imaging, and searches for fast radio bursts. Our optical spectra reveal that the transient source emission cooled from approximately 6 400 K to 2 100 K over a 7-d period and produced no significant optical emission lines. The spectral profiles, cooling rate, and photometric light curves are consistent with the expected outburst and subsequent processes of a binary neutron star merger. Star formation in the host galaxy probably ceased at least a Gyr ago, although there is evidence for a galaxy merger. Binary pulsars with short (100 Myr) decay times are therefore unlikely progenitors, but pulsars like PSR B1534+12 with its 2.7 Gyr coalescence time could produce such a merger. The displacement (∼2.2 kpc) of the binary star system from the centre of the main galaxy is not unusual for stars in the host galaxy or stars originating in the merging galaxy, and therefore any constraints on the kick velocity imparted to the progenitor are poor.