Detection of Galactic and Extragalactic Millimeter-wavelength Transient Sources with SPT-3G

Creators: Guns, S.; Foster, A.; Daley, C.; Rahlin, A.; Whitehorn, N.; Ade, P. A. R.; Ahmed, Z.; Anderes, E.; Anderson, A. J.; Archipley, M.; Avva, J. S.; Aylor, K.; Balkenhol, L.; Barry, P. S.; Basu Thakur, R.; Benabed, K.; Bender, A. N.; Benson, B. A.; Bianchini, F.; Bleem, L. E.; Bouchet, F. R.; Bryant, L.; Byrum, K.; Carlstrom, J. E.; Carter, F. W.; Cecil, T. W.; Chang, C. L.; Chaubal, P.; Chen, G.; Cho, H.-M.; Chou, T.-L.; Cliche, J.-F.; Crawford, T. M.; Cukierman, A.; de Haan, T.; Denison, E. V.; Dibert, K.; Ding, J.; Dobbs, M. A.; Dutcher, D.; Everett, W.; Feng, C.; Ferguson, K. R.; Fu, J.; Galli, S.; Gambrel, A. E.; Gardner, R. W.; Goeckner-Wald, N.; Gualtieri, R.; Gupta, N.; Guyser, R.; Halverson, N. W.; Harke-Hosemann, A. H.; Harrington, N. L.; Henning, J. W.; Hilton, G. C.; Hivon, E.; Holder, G. P.; Holzapfel, W. L.; Hood, J. C.; Howell, D. Andrew; Huang, N.; Irwin, K. D.; Jeong, O. B.; Jonas, M.; Jones, A.; Khaire, T. S.; Knox, L.; Kofman, A. M.; Korman, M.; Kubik, D. L.; Kuhlmann, S.; Kuo, C.-L.; Lee, A. T.; Leitch, E. M.; Lowitz, A. E.; Lu, C.; Marrone, D. P.; Meyer, S. S.; Michalik, D.; Millea, M.; Montgomery, J.; Nadolski, A.; Natoli, T.; Nguyen, H.; Noble, G. I.; Novosad, V.; Omori, Y.; Padin, S.; Pan, Z.; Paschos, P.; Pearson, J.; Phadke, K. A.; Posada, C. M.; Prabhu, K.; Quan, W.; Reichardt, C. L.; Riebel, D.; Riedel, B.; Rouble, M.; Ruhl, J. E.; Sayre, J. T.; Schiappucci, E.; Shirokoff, E.; Smecher, G.; Sobrin, J. A.; Stark, A. A.; Stephen, J.; Story, K. T.; Suzuki, A.; Thompson, K. L.; Thorne, B.; Tucker, C.; Umilta, C.; Vale, L. R.; Vieira, J. D.; Wang, G.; Wu, W. L. K.; Yefremenko, V.; Yoon, K. W.; Young, M. R.; Zhang, L.

Abstract

High angular resolution cosmic microwave background experiments provide a unique opportunity to conduct a survey of time-variable sources at millimeter wavelengths, a population that has primarily been understood through follow-up measurements of detections in other bands. Here we report the first results of an astronomical transient survey with the South Pole Telescope (SPT) using the SPT-3G camera to observe 1500 deg² of the southern sky. The observations took place from 2020 March to November in three bands centered at 95, 150, and 220 GHz. This survey yielded the detection of 15 transient events from sources not previously detected by the SPT. The majority are associated with variable stars of different types, expanding the number of such detected flares by more than a factor of two. The stellar flares are unpolarized and bright, in some cases exceeding 1 Jy, and have durations from a few minutes to several hours. Another population of detected events last for 2–3 weeks and appear to be extragalactic in origin. Though data availability at other wavelengths is limited, we find evidence for concurrent optical activity for two of the stellar flares. Future data from SPT-3G and forthcoming instruments will provide real-time detection of millimeter-wave transients on timescales of minutes to months.

Additional Information

© 2021. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2021 March 16; revised 2021 May 21; accepted 2021 May 27; published 2021 August 3. The authors thank Anna Ho for helpful comments on a draft version of this paper. We are also grateful to Jeff DeRosa and Johan Booth for providing guidance for South Pole weather balloons. Thanks to Charles Gammie, Leslie Looney, Paul Ricker, Bob Rutledge, and Laura Chomiuk for invaluable early discussions. The South Pole Telescope program is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through grants PLR-1248097 and OPP-1852617, with this analysis and the online transient program supported by grant AST-1716965. Partial support is also provided by the NSF Physics Frontier Center grant PHY-1125897 to the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Kavli Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through grant GBMF#947 to the University of Chicago. Argonne National Laboratory's work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of High Energy Physics, under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. Work at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a DOE-OS, HEP User Facility managed by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC, was supported under contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359. The Cardiff authors acknowledge support from the UK Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC). The I.A.P. authors acknowledge support from the Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES). J.V. acknowledges support from the Sloan Foundation. The Melbourne authors acknowledge support from the Australian Research Council's Discovery Project scheme (DP200101068). The McGill authors acknowledge funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and the Fonds de recherche du Québec Nature et technologies. The U.C.L.A. and M.S.U. authors acknowledge support from NSF AST-1716965 and CSSI-1835865. This research was done using resources provided by the Open Science Grid (Pordes et al. 2007; Sfiligoi et al. 2009), which is supported by the NSF award 1148698, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. The data analysis pipeline also uses the scientific Python stack (Virtanen et al. 2020; Hunter 2007; van der Walt et al. 2011). This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement. This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, and NEOWISE, which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology. WISE and NEOWISE are funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This paper includes data collected by the TESS mission. Funding for the TESS mission is provided by the NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Facilities: ASAS - The All Sky Automated Survey, ASKAP - , Fermi - , Gaia - , NEOWISE - , ROSAT - , SPT (SPT-3G) - , TESS - , WISE - .

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