Related papers: Towards a BRICS Optical Transient Network (BRICS-O…
Time domain astronomy has come of age with astronomers now able to monitor the sky at high cadence both across the electromagnetic spectrum and using neutrinos and gravitational waves. The advent of new observing facilities permits new…
How often do bright optical transients occur on the sky but go unreported? To constrain the bright end of the astronomical transient function, a systematic search for transients that become bright enough to be noticed by the unaided eye was…
The discovery and subsequent study of optical counterparts to transient sources is crucial for their complete astrophysical understanding. Various gamma ray burst (GRB) detectors, and more notably the ground--based gravitational wave…
The Rapid Telescope for Optical Response (RAPTOR) program consists of a network of robotic telescopes dedicated to the search for fast optical transients. The pilot project is composed of three observatories separated by approximately 38…
I provide an incomplete inventory of the astronomical variability that will be found by next-generation time-domain astronomical surveys. These phenomena span the distance range from near-Earth satellites to the farthest Gamma Ray Bursts.…
We report on the results from the first six months of the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey (CRTS). In order to search for optical transients with timescales of minutes to years, the CRTS analyses data from the Catalina Sky Survey which…
In recent decades, astronomy and astrophysics have experienced several fundamental changes. On one hand, there has been a significant increase in the observation of transient phenomena, which are short-lived events such as supernova…
The Asteroid Terrestrial impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) system consists of two 0.5m Schmidt telescopes with cameras covering 29 square degrees at plate scale of 1.86 arcsec per pixel. Working in tandem, the telescopes routinely survey the…
The observation of a prompt optical flash from GRB990123 convincingly demonstrated the value of autonomous robotic telescope systems. Pursuing a program of rapid follow-up observations of gamma-ray bursts, the Robotic Optical Transient…
The realization that GRBs release a constant amount of energy implies that the post jet-break afterglow evolution would be largely universal. For a given redshift all afterglows should be detected up to a fixed observer angle. We estimate…
Through the international collaborators, we recently established a network of existing and working meter-class telescopes to look for planetary transit events. As a first step, we focus on the TrES3 system, and conclude that there could be…
The past decades have witnessed a lot of progress in gravitational lensing with two main targets: stars and galaxies (with active galactic nuclei). The success is partially attributed to the continuous luminescence of these sources making…
UNIT (The Ukrainian synchronous Network of small Internet Telescopes) is a system of automated telescopes that search for simultaneous optical activity of transient objects associated with variable stars, small bodies of the Solar system,…
SiTian is an ambitious ground-based all-sky optical monitoring project, developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The concept is an integrated network of dozens of 1-m-class telescopes deployed partly in China and partly at various…
We report on a ~5th magnitude flash detected for approximately 10 minutes by two CONCAM all-sky cameras located in Cerro Pachon - Chile and La Palma - Spain. A third all-sky camera, located in Cerro Paranal - Chile did not detect the flash,…
This paper is an extended summary of the talk I gave at IAU Symposium "New Horizons in Time Domain Astronomy" (Oxford, 2011). I first review the history of transients (which is intimately related to the advent of wide-field telescopic…
The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) triggers on-board in response to $\sim$ 40 short gamma-ray bursts (SGRBs) per year; however, their large localization regions have made the search for optical counterparts a challenging endeavour. We…
The ANTARES telescope has the opportunity to detect transient neutrino sources, such as gamma-ray bursts, core-collapse supernovae, flares of active nuclei... To enhance the sensitivity to these sources, we have developed a new detection…
The Burst Observer and Optical Transient Exploring System (BOOTES) is a network of telescopes that allows the continuous monitoring of transient astrophysical sources. It was originally devoted to the study of the optical emission from…
Exploration of time domain is now a vibrant area of research in astronomy, driven by the advent of digital synoptic sky surveys. While panoramic surveys can detect variable or transient events, typically some follow-up observations are…