Ultra Fast Astronomy: Optimized Detection of Multimessenger Transients

2021

Full text Open access: Gold Metadata (CSL-JSON)
DOI 10.21105/astro.2101.02714
Data confidence 70 medium
How this score is calculated

It is built from checkable properties of the record itself: whether the article has a DOI, how many independent sources confirmed its data, whether the required fields are filled in, and how recent the latest confirmation is. Disagreement between sources and a missing identifier lower it. A value of 80 or above means the record was published without further checking; 60 to 79 means it is published at reduced confidence, with a manual check advisable. A record verified by an editor by hand is never pushed below 90 by a recalculation. This scores our data about the article, not the article itself.

Abstract

Ultra Fast Astronomy is a new frontier becoming enabled by improved detector technology allowing discovery of optical transients on millisecond to nanosecond time scales. These may reveal counterparts of energetic processes such as fast radio bursts, gamma ray bursts, gravitational wave events, or play a role in the optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence (oSETI). We explore some example science cases and their optimization under constrained resources, basically how to distribute observations along the spectrum of short duration searches of many targets or long searches over fewer targets. As a demonstration of the method we present some analytic and some numerical optimizations, of both raw detections and science characterization such as an information matrix analysis of constraining a burst delay -- flash duration relation.