3:30–4:30 pm Zoom
Gilbert Holder (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) "The time variable mm-wave sky"
There are several ongoing wide area surveys of the sky at mm-wavelengths, often called “CMB experiments.” With repeated measurements of the same areas of sky, these surveys are sensitive to time-variable mm-wave sources. Recent observations with the South Pole Telescope identified some extremely luminous stellar flares in our Galaxy, found likely extragalactic sources that may be previously unidentified AGN, tracked the variability of many known blazars roughly daily for several years, and measured the thermal fluxes of asteroids. There should soon be mm-wave measurements of gamma-ray bursts from these CMB experiments, as well as possible detections of tidal disruption events, core collapse supernovae, and gravitational wave counterparts. These same observations can also be used to study the early universe.
