| 1. |
- Buitink, Stijn, et al.
(författare)
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Searching for neutrino radio flashes from the Moon with LOFAR
- 2013
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Ingår i: 5th International Workshop on Acoustic and Radio EeV Neutrino Detection Activities. - : American Institute of Physics (AIP). ; , s. 27-31
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Ultra-high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays produce short radio flashes through the Askaryan effect when they impact on the Moon. Earthbound radio telescopes can search the Lunar surface for these signals. A new generation of lowfrequency, digital radio arrays, spearheaded by LOFAR, will allow for searches with unprecedented sensitivity. In the first stage of the NuMoon project, low-frequency observations were carried out with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, leading to the most stringent limit on the cosmic neutrino flux above 1023 eV. With LOFAR we will be able to reach a sensitivity of over an order of magnitude better and to decrease the threshold energy.
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| 2. |
- Nelles, Anna, et al.
(författare)
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Detecting radio emission from air showers with LOFAR
- 2013
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Ingår i: 5th International Workshop on Acoustic and Radio EeV Neutrino Detection Activities. - : American Institute of Physics (AIP). ; , s. 105-110
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- LOFAR (the Low Frequency Array) is the largest radio telescope in the world for observing low frequency radio emission from 10 to 240 MHz. In addition to its use as an interferometric array, LOFAR is now routinely used to detect cosmic ray induced air showers by their radio emission. The LOFAR core in the Netherlands has a higher density of antennas than any dedicated cosmic ray experiment in radio. On an area of 12 km2 more than 2300 antennas are installed. They measure the radio emission from air showers with unprecedented precision and, therefore, give the perfect opportunity to disentangle the physical processes which cause the radio emission in air showers. In parallel to ongoing astronomical observations LOFAR is triggered by an array of particle detectors to record time-series containing cosmic-ray pulses. Cosmic rays have been measured with LOFAR since June 2011. We present the results of the first year of data.
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| 3. |
- Villarroel, Beatriz, et al.
(författare)
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Launching the VASCO Citizen Science Project
- 2022
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Ingår i: Universe. - : MDPI AG. - 2218-1997. ; 8:11, s. 561-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project investigates astronomical surveys spanning a time interval of 70 years, searching for unusual and exotic transients. We present herein the VASCO Citizen Science Project, which can identify unusual candidates driven by three different approaches: hypothesis, exploratory, and machine learning, which is particularly useful for SETI searches. To address the big data challenge, VASCO combines three methods: the Virtual Observatory, user-aided machine learning, and visual inspection through citizen science. Here we demonstrate the citizen science project and its improved candidate selection process, and we give a progress report. We also present the VASCO citizen science network led by amateur astronomy associations mainly located in Algeria, Cameroon, and Nigeria. At the moment of writing, the citizen science project has carefully examined 15,593 candidate image pairs in the data (ca. 10% of the candidates), and has so far identified 798 objects classified as "vanished". The most interesting candidates will be followed up with optical and infrared imaging, together with the observations by the most potent radio telescopes.
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| 4. |
- Villarroel, Beatriz, et al.
(författare)
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The Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations Project. I. USNO Objects Missing in Modern Sky Surveys and Follow-up Observations of a "Missing Star"
- 2020
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Ingår i: Astronomical Journal. - : American Astronomical Society. - 0004-6256 .- 1538-3881. ; 159:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper we report the current status of a new research program. The primary goal of the "Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations" project is to search for vanishing and appearing sources using existing survey data to find examples of exceptional astrophysical transients. The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations. In this first paper we present new, deeper observations of the tentative candidate discovered by Villarroel et al. in 2016. We then perform the first searches for vanishing objects throughout the sky by comparing 600 million objects from the US Naval Observatory Catalogue (USNO) B1.0 down to a limiting magnitude of similar to 20-21 with the recent Pan-STARRS Data Release-1 (DR1) with a limiting magnitude of similar to 23.4. We find about 150,000 preliminary candidates that do not have any Pan-STARRS counterpart within a 30 '' radius. We show that these objects are redder and have larger proper motions than typical USNO objects. We visually examine the images for a subset of about 24,000 candidates, superseding the 2016 study with a sample 10 times larger. We find about 100 point sources visible in only one epoch in the red band of the USNO, which may be of interest in searches for strong M-dwarf flares, high-redshift supernovae, or other categories of unidentified red transients.
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