Speaker
Description
More Transients and Pulsars (MeerTRAP) is an ERC-funded project to search for fast radio transients, including pulsars and Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), using the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. To that end, we employ the FBFUSE beamformer combined with a real time, single pulse search pipeline that operates commensally with other MeerKAT users. Thus, in over five years of regular observing, we have amassed more than 30,000 hours on-sky, and have discovered almost 100 new transients within the Galaxy and over 50 extragalactic FRBs. Thanks to MeerKAT’s excellent spatial resolution, we can localise discoveries to sub-arcsecond precision, providing an excellent opportunity for follow-up campaigns using various telescopes in different observing bands. Additionally, the 0.65-m optical telescope that shadows daytime MeerKAT observations, MeerLICHT, is now operational, providing prompt optical follow-up to MeerTRAP discoveries. In this talk, I will give an overview of MeerTRAP, our discoveries, and the role of multi-wavelength follow-up in illuminating questions in transient astronomy such as the still-mysterious origin of FRBs.
