Qual Reference: Radio Transient Surveys

2010 July 27

I’ve already tabulated a bunch of surveys in the scientific merit post, but here I’ll add some extra information on a few of the key ones. I’ve attempted to compute quantities as uniformly as possible, but this can be pretty difficult. Carets denote quantities I’ve estimated indirectly myself, rather than gotten fairly directly from one of the references.

Quantity                  AGCTS  Hyman+/GMRT  Becker+/VLA  Bower+/VLA
Total time (h)            ~200^  66           ~200^        315^
FWHM (deg)                1.13   2            0.17^        0.17, 0.1^
Freq (GHz)                3.09   0.235        4.86         5, 8.4
Snapshot RMS (mJy/bm)     ~35^   3-10         0.3^         0.04-0.05
Snapshot duration (m)     ~5^    138          ~1.5^        ~20
2-epoch eff. area (deg²)  854    69           23.2         30.97

Still not quite sure that I’m compute the 2-epoch effective area correctly, and I’m definitely sure that I’m being sloppy since that metric is a technically function of the detection limit. I’m basically taking N_snapshot * A_snapshot for that assessment. (Hand-written table in not-ATA notebook #1, p. 73.)

(Survey references are: Hyman+ GMRT, Becker+ VLA, Bower+ VLA.)