The AARTFAAC 60 MHz transients survey

Abstract

ABSTRACT We report the experimental set-up and overall results of the AARTFAAC wide-field radio survey, which consists of observing the sky within 50° of Zenith, with a bandwidth of 3.2 MHz, at a cadence of 1 s, for 545 h. This yielded nearly 4 million snapshots, two per second, of on average 4800 square degrees and a sensitivity of around 60 Jy. We find two populations of transient events, one originating from PSR B0950+08 and one from strong ionospheric lensing events, as well as a single strong candidate for an extragalactic transient, with a peak flux density of 80 ± 30 Jy and a dispersion measure of $73\pm 3\, \mathrm{~pc~cm^{-3}}$. We also set a strong upper limit of 1.1 all-sky per day to the rate of any other populations of fast, bright transients. Lastly, we constrain some previously detected types of transient sources by comparing our detections and limits with other low-frequency radio transient surveys.