Related papers: The VAO Transient Facility
This paper is an extended summary of the talk I gave at IAU Symposium "New Horizons in Time Domain Astronomy" (Oxford, 2011). I first review the history of transients (which is intimately related to the advent of wide-field telescopic…
In the multi-messenger era, facilities share their results with the scientific community through networks such as the General Coordinates Network to study transient phenomena (e.g., Gamma-ray bursts) and implement real-time analysis…
With SKA precursor and pathfinder operations in full swing, radio and (sub-)mm astronomy is entering the era of super big data. The big questions is how to make (sub-)mm and radio data available to the astronomical community, preferably…
The Virtual Observatory (VO) is a global ecosystem of interoperating services that connect worldwide data archives. The VO is implemented in all major astronomy archives through common interfaces developed by the 22 members of the…
Over the next decade, we can expect time domain astronomy to flourish at optical and radio wavelengths. In parallel with these efforts, a dedicated transient "machine" operating at higher energies (X-ray band through soft gamma-rays) is…
Fink is a broker designed to enable science with large time-domain alert streams such as the one from the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). It exhibits traditional astronomy broker features such as…
The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a wide-field experiment designed to investigate the optical transient and variable sky on time scales from minutes to years. PTF uses the CFH12k mosaic camera, with a field of view of 7.9 deg^2 and a…
Temporal sampling does more than add another axis to the vector of observables. Instead, under the recognition that how objects change (and move) in time speaks directly to the physics underlying astronomical phenomena, next-generation…
We present an exploration of technosignature research that is possible using real-time alert brokers from surveys such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and the upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Nine alert brokers…
SkyPortal is an open-source software package designed to efficiently discover interesting transients, manage follow-up, perform characterization, and visualize the results. By enabling fast access to archival and catalog data,…
The Virtual Observatory (VO) is realizing global electronic integration of astronomy data. One of the long-term goals of the U.S. VO project, the Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO), is development of services and protocols that respond…
Modern astronomical surveys, such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), are capable of detecting thousands of transient events per year, necessitating the use of automated and scalable data analysis techniques. Recent advances in machine…
The unprecedented volume and rate of transient events that will be discovered by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) demands that the astronomical community update its followup paradigm. Alert-brokers -- automated software system to…
One of the new frontiers of astronomical research is the exploration of time variability on the sky at different wavelengths and flux levels. We have carried out a pilot project using DPOSS data to study strong variables and transients, and…
The singular way of scheduling at major observatories has favored certain types of astronomy. This has led to the discrimination of certain types of observations which could not be accommodated. It is the goal of future operations to open…
In the coming era of data-intensive science, it will be increasingly important to be able to seamlessly move between scientific results, the data analyzed in them, and the processes used to produce them. As observations, derived data…
Virtual Observatory (VO) is a data intensive online astronomical research and education environment, taking advantages of advanced information technologies to achieve seamless and uniform access to astronomical information. The concept of…
Observatories are complex scientific and technical institutions serving diverse users and purposes. Their telescopes, instruments, software, and human resources engage in interwoven workflows over a broad range of timescales. These…
A new concept, called the spatio-temporal transfer function (STTF), is introduced to characterise a class of linear time-invariant (LTI) spatio-temporal dynamical systems. The spatio-temporal transfer function is a natural extension of the…
An essential capability of the Virtual Observatory is a means for describing what data and computational facilities are available where, and once identified, how to use them. The data themselves have associated metadata (e.g., FITS…