Related papers: CATCH: Chasing All Transients Constellation Hunter…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright and nearby stars. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2017 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission. The spacecraft will be placed into a highly…
To search for optical counterparts to gravitational waves, it is crucial to develop an efficient follow-up method that allows for both a quick telescopic scan of the event localization region and search through the resulting image data for…
Astronomical transients are intrinsically interesting things to study. Fast optical transients (microsecond timescale) are a largely unexplored field of optical astronomy mainly due to the fact that large optical telescopes are…
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…
HERMES is a scientific mission composed of 3U nano-satellites dedicated to the detection and localization of high-energy astrophysical transients, with a distributed space architecture to form a constellation in Earth orbits. The space…
The Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS) promises revolutionary science in the X-ray and multi-messenger time domain. AXIS will leverage excellent spatial resolution (<1.5 arcsec), sensitivity (80x that of Swift), and a large collecting…
Thanks to the advent of sensitive gravitational wave (GW) and neutrino detectors, multi-messenger (MM) astronomy will deeply transform our understanding of the Universe contents and evolution over cosmological times. To fully exploit the…
In the last years, the need for automated real-time detection and classification of astronomical transients began to be more impelling. Better technologies involve a higher number of detected candidates and an automated classification will…
The forthcoming launch of the Ultraviolet Transient Astronomy Satellite (ULTRASAT) will transform our understanding of the transient ultraviolet sky by increasing our ability to identify transients due to its unprecedented 204 deg2 field of…
This White Paper summarizes the discussions from a five-day workshop, involving 50 people from 18 countries, held in Cape Town, South Africa in February 2020. Convened by the International Astronomical Union's Executive Committee Working…
The Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is a new ground-based sky survey designed to find transiting Neptunes and super-Earths. By covering at least sixteen times the sky area of Kepler we will find small planets around stars that are…
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…
The impact of large-scale constellations of satellites, is a concern for ground-based astronomers. In recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of satellites in Low-Earth Orbit and this trend is set to continue. The…
Although a multitude of studies have focused on targeted observations of Galactic X-ray transients, blind surveys and population studies have been limited. We have used the ROSAT, eROSITA and Gaia source catalogs to find Galactic X-ray…
A fleet of nanosatellites using precise timing synchronization provided by the Global Positioning System is a new concept for monitoring the gamma-ray sky that can achieve both all-sky coverage and good localization accuracy. We are…
The next generation of observatories will facilitate the discovery of new types of astrophysical transients. The detection of such phenomena, whose characteristics are presently poorly constrained, will hinge on the ability to perform blind…
HERMES (High Energy Rapid Modular Ensemble of Satellites) pathfinder is an in-orbit demonstration consisting of a constellation of six 3U nano-satellites hosting simple but innovative detectors for the monitoring of cosmic high-energy…
We present the science case for the proposed Daksha high energy transients mission. Daksha will comprise of two satellites covering the entire sky from 1~keV to $>1$~MeV. The primary objectives of the mission are to discover and…
The HERMES-TP/SP (High Energy Rapid Modular Ensemble of Satellites -- Technologic and Scientific Pathfinder) is an in-orbit demonstration of the so-called distributed astronomy concept. Conceived as a mini-constellation of six 3U…
We describe the results of the first year of a program to localize new Galactic Transient sources discovered by MAXI with NASA's Swift mission. Swift is ideally suited for follow-up of MAXI discovered transients as its X-ray Telescope (XRT)…