Oral Presentation
Current status of the BURSTT Ogasawara Station
Presenter: Hiroto Masaoka (Mizusawa VLBI Observatory, NAOJ/UTokyo)
Fast Radio Burst (FRB) is an incredibly powerful radio burst with an extremely short duration of milliseconds. Despite the successful localization of approximately 30 FRBs to date, their origin and emission mechanisms remain elusive due to the limited samples. We aim to localize 100 FRBs per year with an angular resolution of sub-arcseconds using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations with a baseline of 2000km between the BURSTT stations in Taiwan and an international outrigger station in Ogasawara Island, Japan. This BURSTT international collaboration with such a long baseline will provide a tenfold improvement in angular resolution, crucial for precise FRB localization. With such superb localization accuracy, we will be able to identify not only the FRB host galaxy, but also the FRB’s position within the galaxy. This will be a breakthrough in elucidating the FRB progenitors and the environment surrounding them. In December 2024, we conducted a deployment of the Ogasawara BURSTT station prototype, OGA-16. This system is designed based on the BURSTT architecture, with several key modifications: [1] The reference signal of 10 MHz and the pulse per second (PPS) signal for OGA-16 are derived from the Hydrogen maser clock of the VERA system. [2] Due to space limitations at the Ogasawara site, the antennas were arranged in an 8x2 configuration. [3] To achieve 100% common sky coverage with the BURSTT main station, the antennas were tilted 18 degree toward the western sky. We successfully detected solar fringes as the first light observations, confirming the system’s functionality.
asiaa.sinica.edu.tw