The CATS Service: an Astrophysical Research Tool

TL;DR

CATS is a comprehensive, publicly accessible astrophysical catalog support system that enables efficient searching and cross-matching of over 400 catalogs across multiple wavelengths, supporting astronomical research since 1997.

Contribution

This paper details the current capabilities and extensive catalog collection of CATS, a unique tool for multi-wavelength astronomical data retrieval and analysis.

Findings

Contains about 10^9 records from 400 catalogs

Handles around 1500 user requests daily

Has been operational and evolving since 1997

Abstract

We describe the current status of CATS (astrophysical CATalogs Support system), a publicly accessible tool maintained at Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SAO RAS) (http://cats.sao.ru) allowing one to search hundreds of catalogs of astronomical objects discovered all along the electromagnetic spectrum. Our emphasis is mainly on catalogs of radio continuum sources observed from 10 MHz to 245 GHz, and secondly on catalogs of objects such as radio and active stars, X-ray binaries, planetary nebulae, HII regions, supernova remnants, pulsars, nearby and radio galaxies, AGN and quasars. CATS also includes the catalogs from the largest extragalactic surveys with non-radio waves. In 2008 CATS comprised a total of about 10e9 records from over 400 catalogs in the radio, IR, optical and X-ray windows, including most source catalogs deriving from observations with the Russian radio telescope RATAN-600. CATS offers several search tools through different ways of access, e.g. via web interface and e-mail. Since its creation in 1997 CATS has managed about 10,000 requests. Currently CATS is used by external users about 1500 times per day and since its opening to the public in 1997 has received about 4000 requests for its selection and matching tasks.