Real-time triggering capabilities for Fast Radio Bursts at the MeerKAT telescope

Abstract

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are bright enigmatic radio pulses of roughly millisecond duration that come from extragalactic distances. As part of the MeerTRAP project, we use the MeerKAT telescope array in South Africa to search for and localise those bursts to high precision in real-time. We aim to pinpoint FRBs to their host galaxies and, thereby, to understand how they are created. However, the transient nature of FRBs presents various challenges, e.g. in system design, raw compute power and real-time communication, where the real-time requirements are reasonably strict (a few tens of seconds). Rapid data processing is essential for us to be able to retain high-resolution data of the bursts, to localise them, and to minimise the delay for follow-up observations. We give a short overview of the data analysis pipeline, describe the challenges faced, and elaborate on our initial design and implementation of a real-time triggering infrastructure for FRBs at the MeerKAT telescope.

4 pages, 1 figure, proceedings of the ADASS XXX (2020) conference, to appear in ASP Conference Series

References in corpus (1)

• VOEvent Standard for Fast Radio Bursts

Cited by in corpus (7)

• First discoveries and localisations of Fast Radio Bursts with MeerTRAP: a real-time, commensal MeerKAT survey
• A sample of Fast Radio Bursts discovered and localised with MeerTRAP at the MeerKAT telescope
• MeerTRAP: Twelve Galactic fast transients detected in a real-time, commensal MeerKAT survey
• Effect of Redshift Distributions of Fast Radio Bursts on Cosmological Constraints
• Contemporaneous optical-radio observations of a fast radio burst in a close galaxy pair
• Modeling the Cosmic Dispersion Measure in the D < 120 Mpc Local Universe
• Finding radio transients with anomaly detection and active learning based on volunteer classifications