Searching For Fast Radio Transients And Radio Pulsars Using SPOTLIGHT

TL;DR

This paper discusses advances in radio transient and pulsar astronomy, emphasizing the role of high-performance computing and the need for software upgrades to handle large data volumes from modern telescopes.

Contribution

It explores the use of the SPOTLIGHT collaboration and modern GPU-driven hardware to improve detection of fast radio transients and pulsars.

Findings

Enhanced detection capabilities for microsecond-scale astronomical events.

Importance of software upgrades to match hardware advancements.

Potential to answer longstanding questions about neutron stars.

Abstract

Our initial impressions of astronomical objects was that they are inherently "static" over the course of any reasonably long observation. However, with the discovery of quasars and their scintillation in 1963-64, we learnt that there are transient phenomena even at the astronomical scales. The world of known transients has been expanding ever since then. Objects and phenomena like quasars, gamma ray bursts (GRBs), pulsars, rotating radio transients (RRATs), fast radio bursts (FRBs) and ultra long period transients (ULPTs) have answered several unanswered questions about the end states of stellar collapse, i.e, the formation and properties of back holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs. Even more interestingly, they have made us better realise how little we know about the universe. Even after more than 5 decades of research, many lurking questions about neutron stars await answers. In the current work, I explored the arena of FRB and radio pulsar astronomy by joining and contributing to the efforts of the SPOTLIGHT collaboration. The recent decades have witnessed huge leaps in radio instrumentation and high performance computing (HPC) technologies driven by the development of high throughput Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). These major technological advancements are conducive to probing extremely small time scales (up to microseconds) of astronomical events. Modern and next generation radio transients surveys at existing and upcoming radio telescopes worldwide are designed to make optimal use of the available resources to push the research frontiers with the sheer volume of data they produce (hence the terminology, data-driven astronomy). There is an urgent need to upgrade the existing time-domain radio astronomy software to keep up with the pace of the technological revolution on the hardware side. Although pulsar phenomena has been studied in great detail...