Using a prototype of the Tomo-e Gozen wide-field CMOS mosaic camera, we acquire wide-field optical images at a cadence of 2 Hz and search them for transient sources of duration 1.5 to 11.5 seconds. Over the course of eight nights, our survey encompasses the equivalent of roughly two days on one square degree, to a fluence equivalent to a limiting magnitude about V=15.6 in a 1-second exposure. After examining by eye the candidates identified by a software pipeline, we find no sources which meet all our criteria. We compute upper limits to the rate of optical transients consistent with our survey, and compare those to the rates expected and observed for representative sources of ephemeral optical light.
@article{arxiv.1910.11343,
title = {An optical search for transients lasting a few seconds},
author = {Michael W. Richmond and Masaomi Tanaka and Tomoki Morokuma and Shigeyuki Sako and Ryou Ohsawa and Noriaki Arima and Nozomu Tominaga and Mamoru Doi and Tsutomu Aoki and Ko Arimatsu and Makoto Ichiki and Shiro Ikeda and Yoshifusa Ita and Toshihiro Kasuga and Koji S. Kawabata and Hideyo Kawakita and Naoto Kobayashi and Mitsuru Kokubo and Masahiro Konishi and Hiroyuki Maehara and Hiroyuki Mito and Takashi Miyata and Yuki Mori and Mikio Morii and Kentaro Motohara and Yoshikazu Nakada and Shin-Ich and Hiroki Onozato and Yuki Sarugaku and Mikiya Sato and Toshikazu Shigeyama and Takao Soyano and Hidenori Takahashi and Ataru Tanikawa and Ken'ichi Tarusawa and Seitaro Urakawa and Fumihiko Usui and Junichi Watanabe and Takuya Yamashita and Makoto Yoshikawa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.11343},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in PASJ, 26 pages, 10 figures. The posted version here is our original manuscript, before any changes in response to the referee's comments; to see a copy of the version which was accepted for publication, go to http://spiff.rit.edu/richmond/pub/tomoe_trans.pdf