374 research outputs found
A prototype model for evaluating SKA-LOW station calibration
The Square Kilometre Array telescope at low-frequency (SKA-Low) will be a phased array telescope supporting a wide
range of science cases covering the frequency band 50 - 350 MHz, while at the same time asking for high sensitivity and
excellent characteristics. These extremely challenging requirements resulted in a design using 512 groups of 256 log
periodic dual polarized antennas each (where each group is called “station”), for a total of 131072 antennas. The 512
stations are randomly distributed mostly within a dense area around the centre of the SKA-Low, and then in 3 arms having
16 station clusters each.
In preparation for the SKA Phase 1 (SKA1) System Critical Design Review (CDR), prototype stations were deployed at
the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) site (Western Australia) near the Murchison Widefield Array
(MWA) radio telescope. The project involved multiple parties in an International collaboration building and testing
different prototypes of the SKA1-Low station near the actual site. This resulted in both organisational and logistic
challenges typical of a deployment of the actual telescope.
The test set-up involved a phased build-up of the complex station of log-periodic antennas, by starting from the deployment
of 48 antennas and related station signal processing (called AAVS1.5, where AAVS stands for Aperture Array Verification
System), followed by expansion to a full station (AAVS2.0). As reference a station with dipole antennas EDA2 (EDA:
Engineering Development Array) was deployed. This test set-up was used for an extensive test and evaluation programme.
All test antenna configurations were simulated in detail by electromagnetic (EM) models, and the prediction of the models
was further verified by appropriate tests with a drone-based radio frequency source. Astronomical observations on Sun
and galaxy transit were performed with calibrated stations of both EDA2, AAVS1.5 and AAVS2.0. All 3 configurations
were calibrated. EM modelling and calibration results for the full station AAVS2.0 and EM verification for the AAVS1.5
station are presented.
The comparisons between the behaviour of the log-periodic antennas and the dipoles have advanced our understanding the
calibration quality and the technological maturity of the future SKA1-Low array
Sect and House in Syria: History, Architecture, and Bayt Amongst the Druze in Jaramana
This paper explores the connections between the architecture and materiality of houses and the social idiom of bayt (house, family). The ethnographic exploration is located in the Druze village of Jaramana, on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus. It traces the histories, genealogies, and politics of two families, bayt Abud-Haddad and bayt Ouward, through their houses. By exploring the two families and the architecture of their houses, this paper provides a detailed ethnographic account of historical change in modern Syria, internal diversity, and stratification within the intimate social fabric of the Druze neighbourhood at a time of war, and contributes a relational approach to the anthropological understanding of houses
SkyMapper and the Southern Sky Survey
This paper presents the design and science goals for the SkyMapper telescope.
SkyMapper is a 1.3m telescope featuring a 5.7 square degree field-of-view
Cassegrain imager commissioned for the Australian National University's
Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. It is located at Siding Spring
Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia and will see first light in late
2007. The imager possesses 16kx16k 0.5 arcsec pixels. The primary scientific
goal of the facility is to perform the Southern Sky Survey, a six colour and
multi-epoch (4 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year sampling) photometric
survey of the southerly 2pi steradians to g~23 mag. The survey will provide
photometry to better than 3% global accuracy and astrometry to better than 50
mas. Data will be supplied to the community as part of the Virtual Observatory
effort. The survey will take five years to complete
SN 2009kf : a UV bright type IIP supernova discovered with Pan-STARRS 1 and GALEX
We present photometric and spectroscopic observations of a luminous type IIP
Supernova 2009kf discovered by the Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) survey and detected also
by GALEX. The SN shows a plateau in its optical and bolometric light curves,
lasting approximately 70 days in the rest frame, with absolute magnitude of M_V
= -18.4 mag. The P-Cygni profiles of hydrogen indicate expansion velocities of
9000km/s at 61 days after discovery which is extremely high for a type IIP SN.
SN 2009kf is also remarkably bright in the near-ultraviolet (NUV) and shows a
slow evolution 10-20 days after optical discovery. The NUV and optical
luminosity at these epochs can be modelled with a black-body with a hot
effective temperature (T ~16,000 K) and a large radius (R ~1x10^{15} cm). The
bright bolometric and NUV luminosity, the lightcurve peak and plateau duration,
the high velocities and temperatures suggest that 2009kf is a type IIP SN
powered by a larger than normal explosion energy. Recently discovered high-z
SNe (0.7 < z < 2.3) have been assumed to be IIn SNe, with the bright UV
luminosities due to the interaction of SN ejecta with a dense circumstellar
medium (CSM). UV bright SNe similar to SN 2009kf could also account for these
high-z events, and its absolute magnitude M_NUV = -21.5 +/- 0.5 mag suggests
such SNe could be discovered out to z ~2.5 in the PS1 survey.Comment: Accepted for publication in APJ
The Murchison Widefield Array
It is shown that the excellent Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory site
allows the Murchison Widefield Array to employ a simple RFI blanking scheme and
still calibrate visibilities and form images in the FM radio band. The
techniques described are running autonomously in our calibration and imaging
software, which is currently being used to process an FM-band survey of the
entire southern sky.Comment: Accepted for publication in Proceedings of Science [PoS(RFI2010)016].
6 pages and 3 figures. Presented at RFI2010, the Third Workshop on RFI
Mitigation in Radio Astronomy, 29-31 March 2010, Groningen, The Netherland
WSClean : an implementation of a fast, generic wide-field imager for radio astronomy
This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.Astronomical widefield imaging of interferometric radio data is computationally expensive, especially for the large data volumes created by modern non-coplanar many-element arrays. We present a new widefield interferometric imager that uses the w-stacking algorithm and can make use of the w-snapshot algorithm. The performance dependencies of CASA's w-projection and our new imager are analysed and analytical functions are derived that describe the required computing cost for both imagers. On data from the Murchison Widefield Array, we find our new method to be an order of magnitude faster than w-projection, as well as being capable of full-sky imaging at full resolution and with correct polarisation correction. We predict the computing costs for several other arrays and estimate that our imager is a factor of 2-12 faster, depending on the array configuration. We estimate the computing cost for imaging the low-frequency Square-Kilometre Array observations to be 60 PetaFLOPS with current techniques. We find that combining w-stacking with the w-snapshot algorithm does not significantly improve computing requirements over pure w-stacking. The source code of our new imager is publicly released.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio
Interferometric imaging with the 32 element Murchison Wide-field Array
The Murchison Wide-field Array (MWA) is a low frequency radio telescope,
currently under construction, intended to search for the spectral signature of
the epoch of re-ionisation (EOR) and to probe the structure of the solar
corona. Sited in Western Australia, the full MWA will comprise 8192 dipoles
grouped into 512 tiles, and be capable of imaging the sky south of 40 degree
declination, from 80 MHz to 300 MHz with an instantaneous field of view that is
tens of degrees wide and a resolution of a few arcminutes. A 32-station
prototype of the MWA has been recently commissioned and a set of observations
taken that exercise the whole acquisition and processing pipeline. We present
Stokes I, Q, and U images from two ~4 hour integrations of a field 20 degrees
wide centered on Pictoris A. These images demonstrate the capacity and
stability of a real-time calibration and imaging technique employing the
weighted addition of warped snapshots to counter extreme wide field imaging
distortions.Comment: Accepted for publication in PASP. This is the draft before journal
typesetting corrections and proofs so does contain formatting and journal
style errors, also has with lower quality figures for space requirement
High-energy sources at low radio frequency : the Murchison Widefield Array view of Fermi blazars
This is the accepted version of the following article: Giroletti, M. et al., A&A, 588 (2016) A141, which has been published in final form at DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201527817. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with the EDP Sciences self-archiving policies.Low-frequency radio arrays are opening a new window for the study of the sky, both to study new phenomena and to better characterize known source classes. Being flat-spectrum sources, blazars are so far poorly studied at low radio frequencies. We characterize the spectral properties of the blazar population at low radio frequency compare the radio and high-energy properties of the gamma-ray blazar population, and search for radio counterparts of unidentified gamma-ray sources. We cross-correlated the 6,100 deg^2 Murchison Widefield Array Commissioning Survey catalogue with the Roma blazar catalogue, the third catalogue of active galactic nuclei detected by Fermi-LAT, and the unidentified members of the entire third catalogue of gamma-ray sources detected by \fermilat. When available, we also added high-frequency radio data from the Australia Telescope 20 GHz catalogue. We find low-frequency counterparts for 186 out of 517 (36%) blazars, 79 out of 174 (45%) gamma-ray blazars, and 8 out of 73 (11%) gamma-ray blazar candidates. The mean low-frequency (120--180 MHz) blazar spectral index is : blazar spectra are flatter than the rest of the population of low-frequency sources, but are steeper than at GHz frequencies. Low-frequency radio flux density and gamma-ray energy flux display a mildly significant and broadly scattered correlation. Ten unidentified gamma-ray sources have a (probably fortuitous) positional match with low radio frequency sources. Low-frequency radio astronomy provides important information about sources with a flat radio spectrum and high energy. However, the relatively low sensitivity of the present surveys still misses a significant fraction of these objects. Upcoming deeper surveys, such as the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-Sky MWA (GLEAM) survey, will provide further insight into this population.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio
The Murchison Widefield Array: the Square Kilometre Array Precursor at low radio frequencies
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is one of three Square Kilometre Array
Precursor telescopes and is located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy
Observatory in the Murchison Shire of the mid-west of Western Australia, a
location chosen for its extremely low levels of radio frequency interference.
The MWA operates at low radio frequencies, 80-300 MHz, with a processed
bandwidth of 30.72 MHz for both linear polarisations, and consists of 128
aperture arrays (known as tiles) distributed over a ~3 km diameter area. Novel
hybrid hardware/software correlation and a real-time imaging and calibration
systems comprise the MWA signal processing backend. In this paper the as-built
MWA is described both at a system and sub-system level, the expected
performance of the array is presented, and the science goals of the instrument
are summarised.Comment: Submitted to PASA. 11 figures, 2 table
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