Speaker
Description
Searching for transient events in data taken with the transient array radio telescope (TART) is a challenging task. Localising an actual transient event and ruling out that it is not some kind of radio interference source, all without knowing in advance where or when to look, has been the main cause of the challenge. The TART is a low-cost all-sky interferometer of 24 antennas operating at a central frequency of 1575.42 MHz. With a resolution of about 3.4 degrees, the images are blurry and dominated by bright navigation satellites, making the search for transient events even more difficult. Motivated by such challenges, we began efforts to build a pipeline that reads in raw TART visibility data, builds a model of the known satellites, subtracts them, images what remains, and then tests candidate transients directly on the visibilities with a matched filter. The detection thresholds are measured from the data itself, by checking thousands of random sky directions, rather than assumed from theory. An encouraging result we obtained recently with the pipeline is its detection in the TART data of the solar radio burst of 11 November 2025, at a significance of over 13. The recovered position matches the Sun’s position on that date. This was corroborated with data from four other TART stations, and the event was independently recorded by the RSTN solar monitoring network. In this talk, we present the general workings of the pipeline, give an account of some of its current limitations that we are working to improve on, and then conclude with future plans.