Workshop on Transients on 16th February 2015

There is a variety of known and unknown, Galactic and extragalactic transients. The known transients include supernovae, gamma ray bursts, novae, solar transient phenomenon, pulsars, soft gamma ray repeaters, X-ray binaries, and tidal disruption events etc. However, there are variety of unknown transients recently discovered or waiting to be discovered. A recent example is the discovery of Fast Radio Bursts, whose origin is yet unknown. With the current, reburfished and upcoming facilities like the Jansky VLA, Upgraded GMRT, ASKAP, LOFAR, MWA, SKA etc. in radio bands; Palomer transient factory, Pan-STARRS, LSST, TMT, Gaia and several other robotic sky scanning telescopes in optical bands; Swift, Fermi, Astrosat as well as successors of Swift, Chandra and XMM in gamma-ray and X-ray bands (such as SVOM (France-China), SMART-X (US) and ATHENA (ESA) missions) at high energy bands, and advanced-LIGO interferrometers for gravitational wave detection, a dynamic transient sky is emerging as a frontier area of research in Astrophysics. Thus it is timely to take stock of the existing situation in the transients sky, and make best use of the current facilities and prepare Indian Transients community for the future generation of telescopes.

With the above goals in mind, we are conducting a one day satellite workshop on transients as part of ASI 2015 meeting. The workshop will consist of around 10 invited talks covering various transients aspects across the electromagnetic and gravity-wave spectrum, followed by an hour long intense discussion session towards the end.

Please note that we will not be able to provide any support for travel or accommodation to any of the participants. The organisers will take care of the meals on the day of the workshop.

Poonam Chandra and P. K. Manoharan