Light Echoes of Transients and Variables

SummaryTycho Brahe's observations of a supernova in 1572 challenged the contemporaneous European view of the cosmos that the celestial realm was unchanging. 439 years later we have once again seen the light that Tycho saw, as some of the light from the 1572 supernova is reflected off dust and is only now reaching Earth. These light echoes, as well as ones detected from other transients and variables, give us a very rare opportunity in astronomy: direct observation of the cause (the supernova explosion) and the effect (the supernova remnant) of the same astronomical event. Furthermore, in some cases we can compare light echoes at different angles around a supernova remnant, and thus investigate possible asymmetry in the supernova explosion. In addition, in cases where the scattering dust is favorably positioned, the geometric distance to the SN remnant can be determined using polarization measurements. These techniques have been successfully applied to various transients in the last decade, and the talk gave an overview of the scientific results and techniques, with a particular focus on the challenges we will face in the current and upcoming wide-field time-domain surveys.

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Processing GOTO data with the Rubin Observatory LSST Science Pipelines I: Production of coadded frames

Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia ◽

10.1017/pasa.2020.45 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 38 ◽

Author(s):

J. R. Mullaney ◽

L. Makrygianni ◽

V. Dhillon ◽

S. Littlefair ◽

K. Ackley ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Gravitational Wave ◽

Time Domain ◽

Wide Area ◽

Wide Field ◽

Process Data ◽

Data Production ◽

The Time Domain ◽

Further Development ◽

High Cadence

Abstract The past few decades have seen the burgeoning of wide-field, high-cadence surveys, the most formidable of which will be the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) to be conducted by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. So new is the field of systematic time-domain survey astronomy; however, that major scientific insights will continue to be obtained using smaller, more flexible systems than the LSST. One such example is the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) whose primary science objective is the optical follow-up of gravitational wave events. The amount and rate of data production by GOTO and other wide-area, high-cadence surveys presents a significant challenge to data processing pipelines which need to operate in near-real time to fully exploit the time domain. In this study, we adapt the Rubin Observatory LSST Science Pipelines to process GOTO data, thereby exploring the feasibility of using this ‘off-the-shelf’ pipeline to process data from other wide-area, high-cadence surveys. In this paper, we describe how we use the LSST Science Pipelines to process raw GOTO frames to ultimately produce calibrated coadded images and photometric source catalogues. After comparing the measured astrometry and photometry to those of matched sources from PanSTARRS DR1, we find that measured source positions are typically accurate to subpixel levels, and that measured L-band photometries are accurate to $\sim50$ mmag at $m_L\sim16$ and $\sim200$ mmag at $m_L\sim18$ . These values compare favourably to those obtained using GOTO’s primary, in-house pipeline, gotophoto, in spite of both pipelines having undergone further development and improvement beyond the implementations used in this study. Finally, we release a generic ‘obs package’ that others can build upon, should they wish to use the LSST Science Pipelines to process data from other facilities.

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A special circumstance of airborne induced‐polarization measurements

Geophysics ◽

10.1190/1.1443957 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 61 (1) ◽

pp. 66-73 ◽

Cited By ~ 34

Author(s):

Richard S. Smith ◽

Jan Klein

Keyword(s):

Time Domain ◽

Eddy Currents ◽

High Arctic ◽

Induced Polarization ◽

Laboratory Measurements ◽

Dielectric Polarization ◽

Special Circumstance ◽

Polarization Measurements ◽

Airborne Electromagnetic

Airborne induced‐polarization (IP) measurements can be obtained with standard time‐domain airborne electromagnetic (EM) equipment, but only in the limited circumstances when the ground is sufficiently resistive that the normal EM response is small and when the polarizability of the ground is sufficiently large that the IP response can dominate the EM response. Further, the dispersion in conductivity must be within the bandwidth of the EM system. One example of what is hypothesized to be IP effects are the negative transients observed on a GEOTEM® survey in the high arctic of Canada. The dispersion in conductivity required to explain the data is very large, but is not inconsistent with some laboratory measurements. Whether the dispersion is caused by an electrolytic or dielectric polarization is not clear from the limited ground follow‐up, but in either case the polarization can be considered to be induced by eddy currents associated with the EM response of the ground. If IP effects are the cause of the negative transients in the GEOTEM data, then the data can be used to estimate the polarizabilities in the area.

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