ASD Colloquium
Tuesday · 03:45 PM - 05:00 PM
Probing the gamma-ray sky on longer timescales
Akash Anumarlapudi (UNC Chapel Hill)
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are usually observed to have active emission timescales of a few milliseconds to a few seconds. In addition, there are sources in which the emission lasts for multiple minutes to a few hours, the ultra-long GRBs (UL-GRBs), which currently push the stable timescale of the central engine powering the GRBs. GRB search pipelines exploit the short timescale (milliseconds to seconds) increase in the photon flux to discover GRBs. But this can decrease their detection sensitivity to slowly varying, long-lived (upwards of a few hours) emission from gamma-ray sources. In this talk, I will introduce our detection method that utilizes time-integrated images from the Swift Burst Alert Telescope to discover gamma-ray transients. This complements the current searches on high time-resolution data by expanding the detection timescales from a few minutes to multiple days. Using the archival data from the Swift observatory, I will introduce initial results from our search. In the remaining limited lifetime of Swift, I will also highlight the prospect of near-real-time discoveries.
