R.P. Fender and M.E. Bell
Abstract.
We are at the dawn of a new golden age for radio
astronomy, with a new generation of facilities under construction and
the global community focussed on the Square Kilometre Array as its
goal for the next decade. These new facilities offer orders of
magnitude improvements in survey speed compared to existing radio
telescopes and arrays. Futhermore, the study of transient and variable
radio sources, and what they can tell us about the extremes of
astrophysics as well as the state of the diffuse intervening media,
have been embraced as key science projects for these new facilities.
In this paper we review the studies of the populations of
radio transients made to date, largely based upon archival surveys.
Many of these radio transients and variables have been found in the
image plane, and their astrophysical origin remains unclear. We
take this population and combine it with sensitivity estimates for the
next generation arrays to demonstrate that in the coming decade we may
find ourselves detecting 105 image plane radio transients per year,
providing a vast and rich field of research and an almost limitless
set of targets for multiwavelength follow up.
Keywords: surveys -- telescopes -- transients -- methods: observational --
radio continuum: general -- techniques: miscellaneous
School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK