The goal of the MeerTRAP project is to undertake commensal observations of the radio sky with the MeerKAT telescope to find new fast radio transients and pulsars. The short duration bursts of radio emission from these sources can be used to study the extremes of physics. The pulses detected from the rapidly spinning and highly magnetised pulsars can be used to understand the physics of the emission process, perform tests of gravity and to probe the ultra-dense matter equation of state. Transient and/or short-duration bursts of radio emission have been proposed to originate in a wide range of explosive events such as merging neutron stars, black hole formation and gamma-ray bursts and thus are excellent tools with which to study these phenomena. If these bursts occur at sufficient distances then they can also be used to understand the nature of the intervening material and also potentially the physical state of the Universe. In all cases these astrophysical objects provide us with tools to explore physics that cannot be studies in the laboratory.
To achieve this we use the extremely sensitive MeerKAT telescope to perform commensal radio observations. This provides us with the on-sky time needed to find these rare objects. In parallel we carry out optical searches using MeerLICHT to form unique radio-optical transient data sets. We also designed, build, and commission, the large compute cluster and associated software that is required to search the up to 800 simultaneous views of the sky. We generate triggers from these transients to capture data directly from MeerKAT which we can use to accurately localise them. MeerKAT is a pre-cursor telescope for the international SKAO project to build the world's largest radio telescope.
The innovative software that we are developing for processing, controlling and interpreting our data, including pipeline management, sifting algorithms and machine learning classifiers, will have applications beyond our field and we are therefore making them as public and user friendly as we can.
The overall objectives of MeerTRAP are:
- Discover and localise large numbers of FRBs over a wide range of redshifts to ascertain their nature through an understanding of their host galaxies and environments.
- Use these objects to study the intergalactic medium.
- Probe the nature of the transient and variable radio sky on many timescales to reveal new populations of radio transient objects.
- Perform multi-wavelength studies of these transients, uniquely including simultaneous data from MeerLICHT, as well as follow up with other facilities.
- Discover new radio pulsars, in particular those that might vary on all sorts of timescales due to emission, formation or binary properties and those with long periods.
