September 25
Long durational transient searches with Swift-BAT
Speaker: Akash Anumarlapudi, UNC Chapel Hill
Abstract: Most gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are observed to have active emission timescales of a few milliseconds to a few seconds. However, there are sources in which the emission lasts for multiple minutes to a few hours, the ultralong GRBs (UL-GRBs), which currently push the stable timescale of the central engine powering the GRBs. Traditional gamma-ray burst (GRB) searches 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 a new 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, but also highlight the near-real-time discovery capabilities.