ANTARES: A Prototype Transient Broker System

TL;DR

ANTARES is a prototype system designed to process, filter, and annotate alerts from time-domain surveys like LSST, enhancing their scientific value through external data integration and customizable filtering.

Contribution

The paper introduces the architecture and principles of ANTARES, a flexible system for processing and annotating astronomical alerts from large-scale surveys.

Findings

Designed a flexible alert processing architecture

Implemented annotation with external data sources

Prototype filters for rare or unusual alerts

Abstract

The Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES) is a joint project of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona. The goal is to build the software infrastructure necessary to process and filter alerts produced by time-domain surveys, with the ultimate source of such alerts being the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The ANTARES broker will add value to alerts by annotating them with information from external sources such as previous surveys from across the electromagnetic spectrum. In addition, the temporal history of annotated alerts will provide further annotation for analysis. These alerts will go through a cascade of filters to select interesting candidates. For the prototype, `interesting' is defined as the rarest or most unusual alert, but future systems will accommodate multiple filtering goals. The system is designed to be flexible, allowing users to access the stream at multiple points throughout the process, and to insert custom filters where necessary. We describe the basic architecture of ANTARES and the principles that will guide development and implementation.