Transient Searches | Rahul Jayaraman's personal website

TESS has a 2300 sq. deg field of view that’s amenable to searching for counterparts to poorly-localized transient events, including gamma-ray burst prompt emission and afterglows, as well as optical counterparts to gravitational-wave mergers detected by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA. My primary thesis project centers on the development of a transient detection pipeline for the TESS full-frame images, with the goal of searching for counterparts to these transients.

The full set of transients, with the contemporaneous TESS field of view overlaid, can be found on the TGIF Web Server (link). A list of all known transients (from the Transient Name Server) that TESS observed can be found at here.

Left: An overlap between the TESS field of view and the Fermi-GBM localization of the short GRB 231012A (using tools developed for Mo et al. 2023). Right: The TESS light curve of GRB 230307A, found to be associated with a binary neutron star merger, shows a clear prompt emission component followed by a rising and falling afterglow (Jayaraman et al. 2023).