PhD student Fabian Jankowski has found another glitch in a pulsar J1740-3015 using UTMOST.
Glitches can be likened to “star quakes”, and may involve changes in the surface matter, or the internal structure. These cause a sudden change in the spin period of the pulsar, and is a science driver at UTMOST. Daily monitoring of hundreds of pulsars puts us in a position to discover dozens of pulsar glitches each year.
The glitch has been announced as a Astronomer’s Telegram.
The UTMOST project reached a milestone in early October 2015, timing its 200th pulsar
The implementation of fully automated observing in September 2015, in which the telescope observes from lists of pulsars, slewing to each one, activating the data acquisition instrumentation and processing, has greatly accelerated the numbers of pulsars for which daily timing is possible. We have gone from 100 pulsars in August 2015 to 220 by late October 2015.
Screenshot of just some of the ~220 pulsars being timed at UTMOST (October 2015). As the telescope upgrade proceeds the number of accessible pulsars is expected to increase several fold.
The final aim of the fully upgraded instrument is to time as many as 500 pulsars on a daily to weekly cadence — in a project called TIME. Pulsar timing is part of the PhD project of student Fabian Jankowski, who has been closely involved in the telescope upgrade, implementing automated observing with the telescope, and building ephemerides for the pulsars as they have come within reach of the instrument and are timed.
Congrats to the UTMOST team for this significant milestone in the project!
The Molonglo telescope is an array of 352 smaller telescopes — arranged in two arms aligned east to west, and stretched over 1.6 km.
Such multi-element telescopes are operated in a special, “interferometric” mode, in which the celestial signals they pick up are carefully aligned by the time of arrival at each point in the array. This has two advantages : firstly, the signal can be added up across the array with much greater fidelity, and secondly, the position on the sky from which the signal came can be determined much more accurately.
Molonglo consists of 352 individual elements, each picking up sky signals, and to add all these together requires careful measurement of the arrival time delays of each element relative to the others. Until recently, UTMOST could only achieve this on a limited subset of elements, because we were not yet using the full capabilities of the supercomputer installed on site in May 2015.
The supercomputer uses GPU technology — or Graphics Processing Units. These devices were developed for the gaming industry, are the fastest compute devices available, and have a wide range of uses outside gaming . UTMOST uses 54 of these inexpensive yet powerful devices to process the high volumes of data coming off the telescope in real time, at less than a tenth of the cost of traditional techniques.
In October 2015, UTMOST member Andrew Jameson implemented the GPU based programs which can handle these high data rates (22 Gbytes/sec) and match signals across the entire 352 element array. Our first “correlation triangle”, which measures the signal strength in every pair of elements in the array is shown above.
Full “xGPU” mode correlation will improve the quality of UTMOSTs mapping, burst search and pulsar timing very significantly.
Congratulations to Andrew Jameson for this great achievement.
UTMOST team members Matthew Bailes, Chris Flynn, Manisha Caleb, Shivani Bhanderi and Vivek V Krishnan have visited Caltech in October 2015 for the inaugural Swinburne/Caltech Transients Workshop.
The three-day workshop focused on transient science from Caltech and Swinburne research groups across a wide range of wavelengths, with discussion of instrumentation, data acquisition, and data science techniques — including the search for Fast Radio Bursts — a major UTMOST goal.
Presentations were made by Matthew Bailes on FRBs, Chris Flynn on the status of the Molonglo upgrade and our science capabilities during the commissioning, Manisha Caleb on the expected rates of FRBs at Molonglo and other radio telescopes, and finally by Shivan Bhandari on early map making efforts with UTMOST.
Our talks are available as slides and video using Echo360.
The UTMOST project aims to find a new type of radio emission source — Fast Radio Bursts — discovered in the last few years and primarily seen at the Parkes Radio Telescope. UTMOST has a field of view much larger than any of the telescopes which have seen FRBs to date, an important part of our strategy to increase the discovery rate of these enigmatic signals.
An important validator of our burst searching technology is to look at single, intermittent bursts of radiation, coming from so called RRATs. These are probably neutron stars which, when in their “on” state, emit a bright occasional pulse of radio waves.
UTMOST has now reached sufficient sensitivity in the commissioning process that we can see pulses from the brightest RRAT, J1819-1458. Three pulses were found in an hour’s observing in early October 2015 — very satisfyingly, as we had been searching for pulses from this source over many months.
Plot of the search position on the sky (“beam number”) versus time, for isolated bursts of radiation seen during a 30 minute observation with UTMOST in early October 2015. The symbols show the time and sky location of brief radiation bursts, with symbol type and size indicating parameters of the detection, such as their duration and brightness. The large blue 5-pointed in the upper-middle region of the plot is a burst from the RRAT J1819-1458.
Plot of a single (double-peaked) burst of radiation from the RRAT J1819-1458. The pulse is seen as a function of time (lower plot, on a scale of seconds), and observing frequency (middle-right panel). The other panels show some of the fitted parameters of the burst in our automated detection system.
Image credits: Manisha Caleb, Andrew Jameson and Chris Flynn
UTMOST welcomes Ding Yan to the team. Ding will be part of the site team and directly involved major ongoing upgrade of the telescope hardware and radio detection systems.
Ding comes to us from the University of Sydney where he has just completed his Mechanical Engineering degree.
Welcome Ding!
The UTMOST project reached a milestone in August 2015, timing its 100th pulsar, one with the not very exciting name of J1720-2933. (Pulsars are named for their coordinates on the sky, so end up having IDs like telephone numbers).
As the upgrade to the telescope has progressed, the number of pulsars the system can reach in a typical 10 minute observation has increased, slowly at first, but dramatically through the winter of 2015.
The radio signal from the 100th pulsar is quite weak: there are a few hundred other such pulsars available in catalogs, so that several hundred are now accessible at UTMOST.
The final aim of the fully upgraded instrument is to time as many as 500 pulsars on a daily to weekly cadence — in a project called TIME. Pulsar timing is part of the PhD project of student Fabian Jankowski, who has been closely involved in the telescope upgrade, implementing automated observing with the telescope, and building ephemerides for the pulsars as they have come within reach of the instrument and are timed.
Congrats to the UTMOST team for this significant milestone in the project!
23/June/2015 We are delighted that Professor Matthew Bailes, leader of the UTMOST project, has been awarded a Laureate Fellowship by the Australian Research Council for research into Fast Radio Bursts, pulsar physics and the search for gravitational waves.
Laureate Fellowships are amongst the most prestigious in Australian research. Fifteen were awarded by the ARC in 2015.
The announcement was made today by the Minister for Education and Training, the Hon Christopher Pyne MP, who highlighted that competition has been particular high this year.
Quoting from the press release :
This fellowship … aims to develop and deploy a generic supercomputing solution for the powerful square kilometre array precursor telescopes in Australia and South Africa. ‘Fast radio bursts’ are a new astronomical phenomenon of as yet unknown origin, with enormous potential to probe the cosmos in new ways — but only a handful are known. Concurrently, advances in computer graphics have enabled very low-cost parallel processors to be constructed that are revolutionising radio astronomy signal processing. The telescopes in Australia and South Africa will be used to discover new fast radio bursts, and will also be pursuing a pulsar timing program which seeks to probe the interior of neutron stars, search for gravitational waves and make new tests of general relativity.
Congratulations Matthew for this wonderful achievement!
9th June 2015 UTMOST achieved a new milestone over the weekend, operating for the first time at its full bandwidth coverage of 30 MHz. Up until now, we’ve been operating at 15 MHz bandwidth, but the newly installed GPU supercomputer now allows us to catch and process twice the amount of data live.
We had another first as well — data were taken simultaneously in 3 different science operation modes, TIME, BURST and MAP:
3rd June 2015 The tower extension which is part of the ongoing UTMOST high-speed data link upgrade has been installed at Sutton West, and a 1 meter microwave dish and associated gear have been mounted to it. Minor bracing and site/tower clean up will take place over the next few days. Mark Donnelly is seen bracing temperatures which were subzero with windchill for much of the time!
Activation and commencement of the new link, which will give us 150 Mb/s data rates in and out, is expected in early July.
Image courtesy of Anthony Goonan, YLess4U.