Oral Presentation
The SPOTLIGHT Project: A Commensal Survey for FRBs with the GMRT
Presenter: Ujjwal Panda (National Centre for Radio Astrophysics)
The rate at which new FRBs are being detected has gone up at a startling pace. However, the rate at which these are localised successfully to their host galaxies has not been able to keep up. This is often attributed to the often one-off nature of these events, and to the large FoVs of the survey instruments. A possible solution is to use interferometers, which can offer arcsec to sub-arcsec localisations. However, they are limited by their narrow FoVs. Thus, many interferometers have turned to commensal surveys (e.g.: realfast at the VLA, or CRAFT at ASKAP), wherein objects of interest are searched for whenever the telescope is operational. This compensates for reduced detection rates by increasing the survey’s sky coverage and observing time. In this presentation, we plan to describe the SPOTLIGHT project, a commensal survey for FRBs via the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), funded by the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). A PetaFLOPS-capable backend, using 2000 post-correlation beams on the sky, and covering a frequency range of 300 to 1460 MHz, aims to detect hundreds of FRBs with arc-second on-the-fly localisation.
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