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G. I. Langston, A. H. Minter (NRAO)
Transient radio source candidates detected in the Galactic Plane A (GPA) survey are described. The candidate list presented here is based on 126 hours of observations, scanning 0.060 sr/hour, and recording events with peak flux density brighter than 1 Jy at 8.35 GHz and 2 Jy at 14.35 GHz. These observations have greater sensitivity to longer lived transients. Defining \tau as the period the transient is brighter than the flux density limits, the observed transient rate is RTransient(\tau) = 4.7 \times 105 \tau/1~hour per year over the entire sky.
The observations presented here are consistent with the existence of a class of short term, non repeating transient radio source population. However due to the short duration of these sources we can not distinguish true radio transients from terrestrial interference such as to birds, planes or meteors that are momentarily in the beam. The foreground transient rate greatly exceeds the predicted rates for transient events. Two methods of excluding foreground events are considered which improve the sensitivity of the observations to short lived transient sources. Our observations place upper limits on the rate of transient radio source events and we describe plans for immediate automatic confirmation of transient source candidates in future observations.
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