GReX: An Instrument Overview and New Upper Limits on the Galactic FRB Population
Abstract We present the instrument design and initial results for the Galactic Radio Explorer, an all-sky monitor for exceptionally bright transients in the radio sky. This instrument builds on the success of STARE2 to search for fast radio bursts (FRBs) from the Milky Way and its satellites. This instrument has deployments across the globe, with wide sky coverage and searching down to 32 μ s time resolution, enabling the discovery of new super giant pulses. Presented here are the details of the hardware and software design of the instrument, performance in sensitivity and other key metrics, and experience in building a global-scale, low-cost experiment. We follow this discussion with experimental results on validation of the sensitivity via hydrogen-line measurements. We then update the rate of Galactic FRBs based on non-detection in the time since FRB 200428. Our results suggest FRB-like events are even rarer than initially implied by the detection of a MJy burst from SGR J1935+2154 in 2020 April.
Authors
- J. M. Cordes (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4049-1882)
- Konstantin V. Belov (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5690-340X)
- Zhaoyu Huai (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-1219-5128)
- Liam Connor (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7587-6352)
- Sashabaw Niedbalski (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5007-7470)
- Wael Farah (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0161-7243)
- E. F. Keane (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4553-655X)
- Shami Chatterjee (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2878-1502)
- S. R. Kulkarni (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5390-8563)
- Alexander W. Pollak (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3430-7671)
- Joseph L. McCauley (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4399-2233)
- Kiran A. Shila (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4652-7038)
- O. Johnson (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5927-0481)
- P. K. Shukla
- Hongxing Tang
- Brendan Watters
- Larom Segev (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-4568-3115)
Institutions
- Raman Research Institute (IN)
- California Institute of Technology (US)
- Planetary Science Institute (US)
- Trinity College Dublin (IE)
- Cornell University (US)
- Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian (US)
- Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (US)
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
- Published
- 2025-07-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1088/1538-3873/ade401
- Citations
- 2
- Primary Topic
- Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 2.31
Funders
- Mt. Cuba Astronomical Foundation