The Petabyte Project (TPP) aims to provide a uniform search for fast radio transients in an unprecedented amount of archival data and will better probe transients that are closer, farther, and at higher radio frequencies than previous searches. Our search will be the first to have a robust internal assessment of completeness, allowing us for the first time to confidently project the frequency-dependent rates of FRBs and other transients.
We will achieve this massive undertaking using
- Your, a unified reader to read and process data from multiple formats.
- Heimdall, a GPU accelerated transient detection pipeline.
- FETCH, our revolutionary machine-learning-based transient identifier.
Over the next few years, the TPP team will achieve the following milestones.
- A public release of tagged candidates from a homogeneous search of several petabytes of data.
- A singular rate estimate for FRBs as a function of radio frequency.
- Search for unique FRBs.
- Assess single-pulse emission properties of the radio pulsar population in a telescope-agnostic way.
- Involve students with cutting-edge radio astronomy and data science techniques that will help prepare them for STEM careers in either academia or industry.