The identification of extragalactic fast optical transients (eFOTs) as potential multi-messenger sources is one of the main challenges in time-domain astronomy. However, recent developments have allowed for probes of rapidly-evolving transients. With the increasing number of alert streams from optical time-domain surveys, the next paradigm is building technologies to rapidly identify the most interesting transients for follow-up. One effort to make this possible is the fitting of objects to a variety of eFOT lightcurve models such as kilonovae and γ-ray burst (GRB) afterglows. In this work, we describe a new framework designed to efficiently fit transients to light curve models and flag them for further follow-up. We describe the pipeline's workflow and a handful of performance metrics, including the nominal sampling time for each model. We highlight as examples ZTF20abwysqy, the shortest long gamma ray burst discovered to date, and ZTF21abotose, a core-collapse supernova initially identified as a potential kilonova candidate.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2404.17515,
title = {An Online Framework for Fitting Fast Transient Lightcurves},
author = {Tyler Barna and Brandon Reed and Igor Andreoni and Michael W. Coughlin and Tim Dietrich and Steven L. Groom and Theophile Jegou du Laz and Peter T. H Pang and Josiah N. Purdum and Ben Rusholme},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.17515},
year = {2025}
}