Boötes

Encyclopedia : B : BO : BOT : Boötes

There are very few or no other articles that link to this one.
Please help in articles on [related topics]. After links have been created, remove this message.
This article has been tagged since June 2006.

}

BOOTES, the Burst Observer and Optical Transient Exploring System, is located in Southern Spain and makes use of two sets of wide-field cameras, 240 km apart. These two stations taking simultaneous images will allow astronomers to distinguish near-Earth objects, closer than 1 million km, from more distant phenomena, thus ruling out satellite glints, head-on meteors, etc in order to study the short duration optical transient phenomena that occur in the Universe.

[BOOTES] provides an automated real time observing response to the detection of Gamma Ray Bursts [GRBs]. Error box size depending, it uses wide ﬁeld cameras (WFC), ultra wide field cameras (UWFC) and narrow field cameras (NFC) attached to small robotic telescopes or the telescopes themselves.

To study GRBs it is of the utmost importance to perform prompt optical follow up observations, to detect longer wavelength transient emission associated to them. BOOTES can perform such follow ups. Its scientiﬁc objectives include:

• Simultaneous and quasi simultaneous observations of GRB error boxes.

• Detection of optical ﬂashes of cosmic origin.

• Sky monitoring in the I, R1 & V bands.

• Monitoring of different types of objects in search of recurrent transient optical emission.

• Discovery of comets, [meteors], asteroids, variable stars, novae and supernovae.

BOOTES is part, within the framework of a Spanish-Czech collaboration, of a wide ongoing effort to prepare for the ESA’s satellite INTEGRAL. The project has been now performing rapid follow up observations of events detected by BATSE, BeppoSAX, RossiXTE and the IPN, for two years. Results include:

• Predetection images: they set up upper limits for any possible precursors.

• Simultaneous images: the first was achieved last 20 February 2001, although no counterpart was detected.

• Quasi simultaneous images: i.e. GRB 000313 as shown in the picture at the right.

External links

[BOOTES official website]

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.