Speaker
Description
In recent years, a new class of radio transients has emerged: Long Period Transients (LPTs). These radio transients have unexpectedly long periods of minutes to hours, with burst durations of seconds to minutes. In this project, we have developed a new method of analysing data from LOFAR to detect radio transients on intermediate timecales (seconds to minutes) in real time. It has been tested on 27 observations from the LoTSS survey and will in the future perform real time analysis of commensal LOFAR data using the Euroflash cluster. In order to achieve transient searches in real time, no calibration and no cleaning is performed on the data. A transient search is performed in the image plane on difference images (the residual of subtracted consecutive images) on timescales of 8, 16, 32 and 64 seconds. Filtering algorithms are used to discern artefacts / false positives from possible transients.
