Astronomy Tea Talk

Fast Transient Studies from Massive Survey Streams: How We Enable Them, and What We Can Learn

Alex Gagliano, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/National Center for Supercomputing Applications,

By demanding robust processing pipelines for hundreds of thousands (and soon tens of millions) of nightly alerts, astronomical surveys continue to transform the way we study the time-domain sky. Observatories such as Roman and Rubin are slated to jointly discover millions of supernovae, many at high redshift (z~1); however, our ability to characterize each discovered event in detail has already stagnated due to a dearth of complementary spectroscopic resources for follow-up. In this talk, I will outline my work to leverage contextual information to expand our suite of tools for characterizing and prioritizing detected events. After demonstrating how host-galaxy correlations can be used to improve real-time classification of statistical samples, I will provide a case study for how these data can unveil the progenitor physics of individual events. I will then introduce SCOTCH, the first synthetic catalog containing millions of local and cosmological transients (0.01 < z < 3) and the correlated properties of their host galaxies. SCOTCH will play a decisive role in validating transient analysis software in advance of Rubin, Roman, and Webb first light.

Event Sponsors:

Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy - More events from this Sponsor

For more information, please contact Dana Simard by email at [email protected].