Searching for Fast Optical Transients using VERITAS Cherenkov Telescopes

Abstract

Astronomical transients are intrinsically interesting things to study. Fast optical transients (microsecond timescale) are a largely unexplored field of optical astronomy mainly due to the fact that large optical telescopes are oversubscribed. Furthermore, most optical observations use instruments with integration times on the order of seconds and are thus unable to resolve fast transients. Current-generation atmospheric Cherenkov gamma-ray telescopes, however, have huge collecting areas (e.g., VERITAS, which consists of four 12-m telescopes), larger than any existing optical telescopes, and time is typically available for such studies without interfering with gamma-ray observations. The following outlines the benefits of using a Cherenkov telescope to detect optical transients and the implementation of the VERITAS Transient Detector (TRenDy), a dedicated multi-channel photometer based on field-programmable gate arrays. Data are presented demonstrating the ability of TRenDy to detect transient events such as a star passing through its field of view and the optical light curve of a pulsar.

References in corpus (6)

• The First VERITAS Telescope
• Enhanced Optical Emission During Crab Giant Radio Pulses
• The unusual optical afterglow of the gamma-ray burst GRB 021004: Color changes and short-time-scale variability
• Capability of Cherenkov Telescopes to Observe Ultra-fast Optical Flares
• Rapid Optical Fluctuations in the Black Hole Binary, V4641 Sgr
• A search for optical bursts from the rotating radio transient J1819-1458 with ULTRACAM

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Detectability of optical transients with timescales of sub-seconds
• Fast Radio Bursts from the Decay of Cosmic String Cusps
• MAGIC sensitivity to millisecond-duration optical pulses