Identification and photometric classification of extragalactic transients in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Data Preview 1
Abstract
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon survey the southern sky, delivering a depth and sky coverage that is unprecedented in time domain astronomy. As part of commissioning, Data Preview 1 (DP1) has been released. It comprises a LSSTComCam observing campaign between November and December 2024 with multi-band imaging of seven fields, covering roughly 0.4 square degrees each, providing a first glimpse into the data products that will become available once the Legacy Survey of Space and Time begins. In this work, we search three fields for extragalactic transients. We identify eight new likely supernovae, and three known ones from a sample of 369,644 difference image analysis objects. Photometric classification using Superphot+ assigns sub-classes with >95% confidence to only one SN Ia and one SN II in this sample. Our findings are in agreement with supernova detection rate predictions of supernovae from simulations using simsurvey. The supernova detection rate in the data is possibly affected by the lack of suitable templates. Nevertheless, this work demonstrates the quality of the data products delivered in DP1 and indicates that the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is well placed to fulfill its discovery potential in time domain astronomy.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.22864,
title = {Identification and photometric classification of extragalactic transients in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Data Preview 1},
author = {James Freeburn and Igor Andreoni and Kaylee M. de Soto and Cristina Andrade and Akash Anumarlapudi and Tyler Barna and Jonathan Carney and Sushant Sharma Chaudhary and Michael W. Coughlin and Felipe Fontinele Nunes and Sarah Teague and Mickael Rigault and V. Ashley Villar and Gloria Fonseca Alvarez and Federica B. Bianco and Alexandre Boucaud and Dominique Boutigny and Andrew Bradshaw and Hsin-Fang Chiang and Phil N. Daly and Felipe Daruich and Guillaume Daubard and Holger Drass and Laurent Le Guillou and Leanne P. Guy and Patrick Ingraham and M. James Jee and Steven M. Kahn and Yijung Kang and Arun Kannawadi and Lee S. Kelvin and Didier Laporte and Shuang Liang and Nate B. Lust and Mostafa Lutfi and Gabriele Mainetti and Andrés A. Plazas Malagón and Felipe Menanteau and David J. Mills and Marc Moniez and Erfan Nourbakhsh and Russell E. Owen and Maria T. Patterson and John R. Peterson and Wouter van Reeven and Vincent J. Riot and William Roby and David Sanmartim and Jacques Sebag and Nima Sedaghat and Richard A. Shaw and Alysha Shugart and Krzysztof Suberlak and John D. Swinbank and Dan S. Taranu and Charlotte Ward and Christopher Z. Waters and W. M. Wood-Vasey},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.22864},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
11 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables, accepted for publication in ApJL