Kakeru Oshikiri, Masaomi Tanaka, Nozomu Tominaga, Tomoki Morokuma, Ichiro Takahashi, Yusuke Tampo, Hamid Hamidani, Noriaki Arima, Ko Arimatsu, Toshihiro Kasuga, Naoto Kobayashi, Sohei Kondo, Yuki Mori, Yuu Niino, Ryou Ohsawa, Shin-ichiro Okumura, Shigeyuki Sako, Hidenori Takahashi
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 527(1) 334-345 2023年10月28日 査読有り
ABSTRACT
The population of optical transients evolving within a time-scale of a few hours or a day (so-called fast optical transients, FOTs) has recently been debated extensively. In particular, our understanding of extragalactic FOTs and their rates is limited. We present a search for extragalactic FOTs with the Tomo-e Gozen high-cadence survey. Using the data taken from 2019 August to 2022 June, we obtain 113 FOT candidates. Through light curve analysis and cross-matching with other survey data, we find that most of these candidates are in fact supernovae, variable quasars, and Galactic dwarf novae that were partially observed around their peak brightness. We find no promising candidate of extragalactic FOTs. From this non-detection, we obtain upper limits on the event rate of extragalactic FOTs as a function of their time-scale. For a very luminous event (absolute magnitude M < −26 mag), we obtain the upper limits of 4.4 × 10−9 Mpc−3 yr−1 for a time-scale of 4 h, and 7.4 × 10−10 Mpc−3 yr−1 for a time-scale of 1 d. Thanks to our wide (although shallow) surveying strategy, our data are less affected by the cosmological effects, and thus, give one of the more stringent limits to the event rate of intrinsically luminous transients with a time-scale of <1 d.