A pilot study of interplanetary scintillation with FAST

Abstract

ABSTRACT Observations of interplanetary scintillation (IPS) are an efficient remote-sensing method to study the solar wind and inner heliosphere. From 2016 to 2018, some distinctive observations of IPS sources like 3C 286 and 3C 279 were accomplished with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), the largest single-dish telescope in the world. Due to the 270–1620 MHz wide frequency coverage of the ultra-wideband (UWB) receiver, one can use both single-frequency and dual-frequency analyses to determine the projected velocity of the solar wind. Moreover, based on the extraordinary sensitivity owing to the large collecting surface area of FAST, we can observe weak IPS signals. With the advantages of both the wider frequency coverage and high sensitivity, and also with our radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation strategy and an optimized model-fitting method, in this paper we analyse the fitting confidence intervals of the solar wind velocity and present some preliminary results achieved using FAST, which point to the current FAST system being highly capable of carrying out observations of IPS.