Final Report Summary - ALERT (ALERT - The Apertif-LOFAR Exploration of the Radio Transient Sky)
When you look up, the stars in the sky appear to be unchanging, night after night. But if you had radio eyes, you would see bright flashes every few seconds. When we started ALERT, we knew these flashes were made billions of light years away, but their origin was an outright mystery. The ALERT team has since been involved in the detection and systematic study of many more such flashes. We now know that some repeat, so not all flashes are a sign of some cataclysmic explosion.
We are interested in understanding the flashes, and the vast energies that are required to power them. We thus built one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, to continuously search through the images made by a much upgraded radio telescope, the Westerbork array in The Netherlands. It uses machine learning to very quickly sift through more data than the whole internet of the entire country of the Netherlands, every second. Using this machine we have detected many new flashes. We were able to even detect flashes with LOFAR, at very low radio frequencies. To our surprise, we found some flashes do not seem to be surrounded by clouds of material from past explosions. It appears neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields, a thousand trillion times stronger than the field of Earth, produce the flashes.
We are interested in understanding the flashes, and the vast energies that are required to power them. We thus built one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, to continuously search through the images made by a much upgraded radio telescope, the Westerbork array in The Netherlands. It uses machine learning to very quickly sift through more data than the whole internet of the entire country of the Netherlands, every second. Using this machine we have detected many new flashes. We were able to even detect flashes with LOFAR, at very low radio frequencies. To our surprise, we found some flashes do not seem to be surrounded by clouds of material from past explosions. It appears neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields, a thousand trillion times stronger than the field of Earth, produce the flashes.