The Petabyte Project

TL;DR

The Petabyte Project aims to unify and reprocess decades of radio transient survey data to better understand transient source populations, event rates, and enable new discoveries in radio astronomy.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, uniform data reprocessing pipeline for multiple large-scale radio surveys, addressing previous inconsistencies and enabling robust analysis.

Findings

Reprocessing of several petabytes of data across 20 years.

Enhanced estimates of transient event rates.

Potential for new discoveries from archival data.

Abstract

Transient radio sources, such as fast radio bursts, intermittent pulsars, and rotating radio transients, can offer a wealth of information regarding extreme emission physics as well as the intervening interstellar and/or intergalactic medium. Vital steps towards understanding these objects include characterizing their source populations and estimating their event rates across observing frequencies. However, previous efforts have been undertaken mostly by individual survey teams at disparate observing frequencies and telescopes, and with non-uniform algorithms for searching and characterization. The Petabyte Project (TPP) aims to address these issues by uniformly reprocessing data from several petabytes of radio transient surveys covering two decades of observing frequency (300 MHz-20 GHz). The TPP will provide robust event rate analyses, in-depth assessment of survey and pipeline completeness, as well as revealing discoveries from archival and ongoing radio surveys. We present an overview of TPP's processing pipeline, scope, and our potential to make new discoveries.