Using GREENBURST to find Astrophysical Radio Pulses

To date, over 3,000 pulsars, 100 rotating radio transients (RRATs), and 700 fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been discovered in the past several decades through tedious telescope observations. Telescope time can be quite costly and inefficient, as discoveries are primarily made by pointing the telescope to a nearly random part of the sky and hoping that it makes a detection, and it is important to optimize it as much as possible. GREENBURST is an instrument that is attached to the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope located in Green Bank, West Virginia, and was designed for this optimization. While the telescope is being used for observations, GREENBURST simultaneously takes data using the 1.4 GHz receiver. Each suspected pulse is run through an artificial intelligence pipeline to determine which candidates are most likely to be true astronomical events. Since GREENBURST went online in April 2019, over 30,000 candidates have been detected, with over 7,000 of those matching known pulsars, RRATs, or FRBs. This project reports on ongoing work to sort through the candidates that do not match any known astronomical objects to determine if they are new discoveries.