All-sky rapid transient searches with the Evryscope network
Abstract
The Evryscopes are a North/South pair of all-sky telescopes, each of which hosts an array of up to 27 small telescopes on a common mount, capable of observing the entire sky above airmass ~2 at two-minute cadence with a limiting magnitude of g' ~ 16. The southern site, located in Chile on Cerro Tololo, was deployed in mid-2015 and is currently in production creating multi-year light curves with percent-level precision. The northern instrument has been built and will be deployed to Mount Laguna Observatory (MLO) in California in October 2018. Once the MLO site is online, the instruments will share an overlap region of 4000 sq. degrees centered around the equator. Evryscope 's large field of view and rapid cadence enable exploration of a previously inaccessible parameter space of bright and fast transients across the full sky, including gravitational wave counterpart kilonovae, near-field planetary microlensing signals, and stellar flares. The system is also capable of providing pre-discovery and follow-up light curves for longer-lived transients, such as super- and classical novae, enabling better constraints on early evolution and short-timescale behavior. Within the overlap region, the combined system will provide simultaneous imaging in both Sloan-g' and Sloan-r' filters across an 8,500 km baseline, enabling transient candidate vetting and classification based on parallax and color. In this poster, we present the current status of the Evryscope transients program and highlight recent followup campaigns.
- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #233
- Pub Date:
- January 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AAS...23336311C