RESUMO
This paper is based on a proposal submitted for a BRICS astronomy flagship program, which was presented at the 2019 meeting of the BRICS Astronomy Working Group, held in Rio de Janeiro from 29 September to 2 October 2019. The future prospects for the detection and study of transient phenomena in the Universe heralds a new era in time domain astronomy. The case is presented for a dedicated BRICS-wide flagship program to develop a network of ground-based optical telescopes for an all-sky survey to detect short lived optical transients and to allow follow-up of multi-wavelength and multi-messenger transient objects. This will leverage existing and planned new facilities within the BRICS countries and will also draw on the opportunities presented by other multi-wavelength space- and ground-based facilities that exist within the BRICS group. The proposed optical network would initially perform followup observations on new transients using existing telescopes. This would later expand to include a new global network of \sim â¼ 70 wide-field 1-m telescopes which will cover the entire sky, simultaneously, with a cadence of less than a few hours. This realization would represent a ground-breaking and unique global capability, presenting many scientific opportunities and associated spin-off benefits to all BRICS countries.
RESUMO
IVIA is a joint initiative of at least 8 Latin-American countries plus Portugal and Spain to make good use of large telecommunications antennas that are out of service in these countries, because most international communications are now using submarine cables. The first step will be to refurbish the antennas and then to start doing single dish observations of radiosources. In a second step the antennas will be equipped with VLBI (Very Long Base Interferometry) equipment, to establish a VLBI network. This project will be able to effectively promote scientific integration in Ibero-America. The work is starting in several countries; here we present several scientific cases for the use of the antennas, and we report on the first Brasilian activities.