MILLIMETER TRANSIENT POINT SOURCES IN THE SPTpol 100 SQUARE DEGREE SURVEY
- Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)
- Department of Physics, University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 (United States)
- Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3XQ (United Kingdom)
- NIST Quantum Devices Group, 325 Broadway Mailcode 817.03, Boulder, CO 80305 (United States)
- Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 (United States)
- School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban (South Africa)
- SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (United States)
- Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 Rue University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T8 (Canada)
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{sup 2} patch of sky centered at R.A. 23{sup h}30{sup m} 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.
- OSTI ID:
- 22667305
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 830, Issue 2; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0004-637X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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