AAS 207th Meeting, 8-12 January 2006
Session 136 Long Wavelength Array
Poster, Wednesday, 9:20am-6:30pm, January 11, 2006, Exhibit Hall

## [136.08] The Long Wavelength Array and the Radio Transient Sky

P. S. Ray, T. J. W. Lazio (NRL), S. Ellingson (Virginia Tech.), S. Close (LANL), P. Crane (NRL), S. D. Hyman (Sweet Briar College), B. A. Jacoby (NRC/NRL), W. Junor (LANL), N. E. Kassim (NRL), S. R. Kulkarni (Caltech), Y. M. Pihlstrom, G. B. Taylor (UNM), D. Werthimer (SSL/UCB)

Transient radio sources are necessarily compact and usually are the locations of explosive or dynamic events, therefore offering unique opportunities for probing fundamental physics and astrophysics. In addition, short-duration transients are powerful probes of intervening media owing to dispersion, scattering, and Faraday rotation that modify the signals. While radio astronomy has an impressive record obtaining high time resolution, usually it is achieved in quite narrow fields of view. Consequently, the dynamic radio sky is poorly sampled, in contrast to the situation in the X-ray and \gamma-ray bands.

Operating in the 20--80~MHz range, the Long Wavelength Array (LWA) is one of a suite of next-generation radio telescopes that will explore the radio transient sky. Composed of phased stations'' of dipoles, the LWA can probe the sky for transients on a range of angular and temporal scales, by using an individual station to scan much of the sky or correlating the signals from multiple stations to monitor possible transients. Numerous classes of radio transients, both known and hypothesized, are accessible to the LWA, ranging from cosmic ray air showers and Jovian emission, to bursts from extrasolar planets or other coherent emitters and prompt emission from \gamma-ray bursts, to possible electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave burst sources.

We summarize the scientific potential of radio transient observations with the LWA as well as some of the technical challenges, the most notable of which is the robust excision or avoidance of radio frequency interference (RFI).

Basic research in radio astronomy at the NRL is supported by the Office of Naval Research.