About the project
The IBIS telescope on the INTEGRAL satellite and the BAT telescope on the Swift satellite have been studying the hard X-ray sky for 20 years and have built a huge archive of observations.
The most striking feature of the hard X-ray sky is probably the extreme variability it shows, with many short-lived events lasting less than an hour. Short transient gamma-ray flashes signal key events in the lifetimes of individual galaxies and stellar systems. Both INTEGRAL and Swift telescopes make observations with typical durations of one hour, so looking for shorter events within each observation is a huge task, almost a needle in an astronomical haystack. BUT it’s also where the most exciting science is concealed – short events could be counterparts to the gravitational waves from black hole mergers, or the gamma equivalent of fast radio bursts, or even from terrestrial flashes created in storms. The origins of many of these events are areas of active research, but they need more examples of events.
The aim of this project is therefore quite straightforward – to develop new methods to search for, and identify, interesting transient events in the INTEGRAL and Swift hard X-ray and soft gamma-ray datasets. These methods may be analytical or employing machine learning and techniques derived from data science and ‘big data’ methods.
The student will be based in Southampton but will work with astronomers from the INTEGRAL instrument team (based in Rome and Bologna) and scientists from the European Space Agency. This project will have unique access to the INTEGRAL/IBIS slew data, which adds another 20% of previously unexplored data and will also be able to access near real-time data from INTEGRAL and join the hunt for new sources in the latest observations.
