First results from the REAL-time Transient Acquisition backend (REALTA) at the Irish LOFAR station

¹ School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland
² Astronomy & Astrophysics Section, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, D02 XF86 Dublin, Ireland
e-mail: pearse.murphy@dias.ie
³ Department of Physics, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
⁴ Astrophysics Research Group, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Applied Mathematics, National University of Ireland Galway, University Road, Galway H91 TK33, Ireland
⁵ Centre for Astronomy, School of Physics, National University of Ireland Galway, University Road, Galway H91 TK33, Ireland
⁶ School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland
⁷ Deptartment of Computer and Software Engineering, Athlone Institute of Technology, Athlone, Ireland
⁸ Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
⁹ School of Physics, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland
¹⁰ Armagh Observatory and Planetarium, College Hill, Armagh, BT61 9DG Northern Ireland UK
¹¹ Astrophysics Research Centre, School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN Northern Ireland, UK

Received: 25 January 2021
Accepted: 24 August 2021

Abstract

Modern radio interferometers such as the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) are capable of producing data at hundreds of gigabits to terabits per second. This high data rate makes the analysis of radio data cumbersome and computationally expensive. While high performance computing facilities exist for large national and international facilities, that may not be the case for instruments operated by a single institution or a small consortium. Data rates for next generation radio telescopes are set to eclipse those currently in operation, hence local processing of data will become all the more important. Here, we introduce the REAL-time Transient Acquisition backend (REALTA), a computing backend at the Irish LOFAR station (I-LOFAR) which facilitates the recording of data in near real-time and post-processing. We also present first searches and scientific results of a number of radio phenomena observed by I-LOFAR and REALTA, including pulsars, fast radio bursts, rotating radio transients, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Jupiter, and the Sun.