20–27 Mar 2026
Wild View Resorts
Africa/Gaborone timezone

TRON: Towards Interferometric SETI, with Valuable Prizes Along the Way

22 Mar 2026, 19:12
18m
Wild View Resorts

Wild View Resorts

Plot 80 President Avenue, Kasane, Botswana
In-person - Talk Special Session

Speaker

Oleg Smirnov (Rhodes University & South African Radio Astronomy Observatory)

Description

The TRON (Transient Radio Observations for Newbies) pipeline is designed to image radio interferometric data at raw correlator time resolution, and to
conduct automatic searches for transient and variable radio sources. These
techniques pave the way towards technosignature searches using the full field
of view of an interferometer, given future narrowband correlators. At the
coarser frequency resolution of existing correlators, the same technique can
yield a motherlode of astrophysical discoveries, motivating a systematic
data-mining effort with TRON across the entire MeerKAT archive. This talk will
discuss the imaging and transient search techniques employed by TRON and
highlight some of the astrophysical discoveries made.

Presentation materials

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