The ASKAP Variables and Slow Transients (VAST) Extragalactic Survey - Data Release 1
Iris de Ruiter, Dougal Dobie, Tara Murphy, David L. Kaplan, Emil Lenc, Akash Anumarlapudi, Laura N. Driessen, Ashna Gulati, Assaf Horesh, James K. Leung, Joshua Pritchard, Kovi Rose, Elaine M. Sadler, Gregory Sivakoff, Yuanming Wang, Ziteng Wang

TL;DR
This paper presents Data Release 1 of the VAST survey, providing a large, high-cadence radio variability database covering the extragalactic sky, detecting diverse variable sources including pulsars, stars, and active galactic nuclei.
Contribution
First large-scale, high-cadence, uniform radio variability dataset for the extragalactic sky, enabling future population studies of radio transients with ASKAP.
Findings
117 astrophysical variables identified
Detection of 27 pulsars and 40 radio stars
Discovery of 10 new radio stars
Abstract
The Variables and Slow Transients (VAST) Survey on the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) is designed to systematically explore the dynamic radio sky, detecting sources that vary on timescales from minutes to several years. In this paper, we present Data Release 1 of the VAST Extragalactic Survey, which targets slowly evolving synchrotron transients in the southern sky. The observations were carried out between June 2023 and May 2025, comprising 2945 images of 276 fields spanning , observed at 888 MHz with a typical rms sensitivity of 0.24 mJy and 12-20 arcsec resolution. Each field was revisited approximately every two months, yielding 10 or 11 observations per field. The VAST pipeline extracts the light curves for all the observed sources, and additional filters are implemented to improve the reliability of the resulting light curve…
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Taxonomy
TopicsRadio Astronomy Observations and Technology · Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena · Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena
