Particle and Astroparticle Physics Seminar

Things That Go Flash or Blink in the Night:
Outfitting VERITAS to Explore the High-Cadence Universe

Jeremy Heyl

University of British Colombia

With projects such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and Pan-Starrs, astronomy is entering the regime of high-cadence observations. These large-scale projects will provide deep imaging (typically to 24th magnitude) with approximately daily cadence. This proposal outlines a complementary approach of very rapid cadence (programmable from ~kHz to MHz) using the four twelve-meter VERITAS telescopes. This regime of rapid optical variability is essentially uncharted and so the discovery space is vast. In particular, it could answer the question if gamma-ray bursts, fast radio bursts or gravitational-wave events have a brighter than eighth magnitude counterpart. Furthermore, with such rapid cadence, VERITAS could detect and characterize small objects in the solar system to less than one kilometer diameter well into the Kuiper belt. The number of these objects is not known to better than a factor of one thousand and would provide key insights on the formation of the Solar System.