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Lasair & astronomical alerts

A number of community brokers will receive the data stream about transient, variable, and moving sources produced by the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. These independent software platforms will then ingest, process, and serve astronomical alerts to the broader scientific community. In short, the brokers enable scientists to make science. 

Due to the anticipated high bandwidth of the Rubin Observatory alert stream, a limited number of brokers will receive the stream directly from Rubin, one of which has been developed in the UK.

Lasair – a Full-Stream Alert Broker

UK-based Lasair is one of the seven brokers that will serve Rubin alerts to the scientific community. Lasair aims to be a flexible platform that processes transient alerts rapidly and decide: is this an object I want to follow up? 

The platform will enable all four LSST science themes:

  • Dark Matter and Dark Energy

  • the Solar System

  • the Changing Sky

  • the Milky Way.

The Lasair team comprises researchers from the University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University Belfast, and Oxford University. The term lasair means flame or flash in Scots and Irish Gaelic and is pronounced L-AH-s-uh-r.

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