Alerts and broker workshop in Oxford

The meeting included topics such as lensed supernovae, kilonova search, citizen science, real-bogus classification, solar system objects and technosignatures. In attendance were the UK Lasair team; Lasair is being developed by The University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University Belfast, and Oxford University with the ultimate goal of serving transient alerts from the future NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legact Survey of SPace and Time (LSST).

2025 is due to see the installation of the 's 3.2 gigapxiel camera LSSTCam on the Simonyi Telescope and the start of commissioning and science verification. Much of the exciting early science will come from the nightly processing of the survey images, which will have a reference frame subtracted to reveal everything that moves, varies and explodes in the sky. The sensitivity of these difference images is unprecedented: objects which are typically 100 times fainter than those seen in wide-surveys will be detected.

Guest at the January meeting was Eric Bellm, Research Associate Professor at the University of Washington and Alert Production Science Lead for the Rubin Observatory. Eric highlighted how pleased the Rubin Project team were with the recent ComCam on-sky campaign. The only slight concern was that the data collected over the six-week observing period is merely 10% of one night of LSSTCam data ! 

Other discussions paved the way for further collaboration with other European brokers, and considered the prospect for a ‘super broker’ – bringing together multiple transient surveys. For the Lasair broker, the meeting will improve the learning curve for users and the documentation, and it sharpened the choice of light-curve features – to enable effective alert filters.

A big thank you to the BreakThrough Listen programme for its generous financial support for the meeting. 

Some of the attendees of the recent alerts and broker workshop