Galactic Radio Explorer: an all-sky monitor for bright radio bursts

TL;DR

GReX is an all-sky radio monitor designed to detect bright radio bursts, including Galactic magnetar emissions and super giant pulses, with high time resolution and broad sky coverage to enhance detection prospects.

Contribution

The paper introduces GReX, a novel all-sky radio monitoring instrument with wide bandwidth and high sensitivity, expanding previous efforts like STARE2 for better detection of Galactic and extragalactic radio bursts.

Findings

Forecasts dozens of FRB-like bursts per year with GReX's sensitivity and coverage.

Demonstrates potential to detect super giant pulses from Milky Way pulsars.

Plans for phased deployment across multiple continents to achieve near-complete sky coverage.

Abstract

We present the Galactic Radio Explorer (GReX), an all-sky monitor to probe the brightest bursts in the radio sky. Building on the success of STARE2, we will search for fast radio bursts (FRBs) emitted from Galactic magnetars as well as bursts from nearby galaxies. GReX will search down to ten microseconds time resolution, allowing us to find new super giant radio pulses from Milky Way pulsars and study their broadband emission. The proposed instrument will employ ultra-wide band (0.7-2 GHz) feeds coupled to a high performance (receiver temperature 10 K) low noise amplifier (LNA) originally developed for the DSA-110 and DSA-2000 projects. In GReX Phase I (GReX-I), unit systems will be deployed at Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) and Big Smoky Valley, Nevada. Phase II will expand the array, placing feeds in India, Australia, and elsewhere in order to build up to continuous coverage of nearly 4$\pi$ steradians and to increase our exposure to the Galactic plane. We model the local magnetar population to forecast for GReX, finding the improved sensitivity and increased exposure to the Galactic plane could lead to dozens of FRB-like bursts per year.