The Millimeter Transient Sky
The heavens have a flair for the dramatic. Stars are born then die, galaxies churn, and the very fabric of the universe rapidly expands. Few objects remain steady for our telescopes. Instead, the transient sky dominates. “Transients” are a broad category of astrophysical events defined as anything t...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2024
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/46818/ http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/46818/13/Biermann_Thesis_Final_2.pdf |
| Summary: | The heavens have a flair for the dramatic. Stars are born then die, galaxies churn, and the very fabric of the universe rapidly expands. Few objects remain steady for our telescopes. Instead, the transient sky dominates. “Transients” are a broad category of astrophysical events defined as anything that displays a sudden change in brightness. As is often the case in astrophysics, we can learn about different aspects of these events by studying the different kinds of light, or wavelengths, they emit. Although transient phenomena in optical, in-fared, and radio wavelengths are relatively well-studied, millimeter wavelengths present a gap in our knowledge. These wavelengths are particularly challenging because millimeter-sensitive instrumentation is expensive and complex. Unlike the radio regime, millimeter waves are greatly affected by the atmosphere. Large-scale cosmic microwave background, or CMB, surveys were once reserved for studying the static imprint of our early universe. However, these surveys now have the sensitivity required to join the hunt for transients, allowing us to fill the gap in time domain astrophysics. Wide-field CMB surveys are uniquely suited to searching for transients because they observe large areas of the sky at increasingly lower noise levels. These telescopes are expected to see a variety of events occurring outside our galaxy, such as stars exploding or being ripped apart by black holes, as well as events within the Milky Way such as flaring stars. Transients are already being detected in CMB surveys like The Atacama Cosmology Telescope, known as ACT ([62] and [47]), and The South Pole Telescope ([97] and [30]). Future surveys, such as The Simons Observatory Large Aperture Telescope, or SO-LAT [105], and CMB-S4 [2], are expected to detect at least an order of magnitude more millimeter transient events than current surveys [24]. To get the most out of this science, we must start exploring this parameter space and building the means to detect millimeter transients in real-time. This ... |
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