The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Flux Upper Limits from a Targeted Search for Extragalactic Transients [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2301.07651


We have performed targeted searches of known, extragalactic transient events at millimetre wavelengths using nine seasons (2013–2021) of 98, 150, and 229 GHz Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) observations that mapped ${\sim}40$ per cent of the sky for most of the data volume. We observe at least once 88 gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), 12 tidal disruption events (TDEs) and 203 other transients, including supernovae (SNe). We stack our ACT observations to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the maps. In all cases but one, we do not detect these transients in the ACT data. The single candidate detection (event AT2019ppm), seen at ${\sim}5\sigma$ significance in our data, appears to be due to active galactic nuclei (AGN) activity in the host galaxy coincident with a transient alert. For each source in our search we provide flux upper limits. For example, the medians for the 98 GHz 95 per cent confidence interval upper limits are $28$, $15$, and $16$ mJy for GRBs, SNe, and TDEs respectively. The sensitivity of future wide-area cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys should be good enough to detect many of these events using the methods described in this paper.

Read this paper on arXiv…

C. Hervías-Caimapo, S. Naess, A. Hincks, et. al.
Thu, 19 Jan 23
64/100

Comments: 13 pages, 4 figures, 8 tables. The full tables of flux upper limits for individual transients will be available at this https URL Submitted to MNRAS