Astro-COLIBRI -- The COincidence LIBrary for Real-time Inquiry for multimessenger astrophysics

TL;DR

Astro-COLIBRI is a real-time, multi-platform tool that filters and contextualizes transient astrophysical alerts to enhance discovery and follow-up observations in multimessenger astronomy.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive software architecture integrating real-time alerts, databases, and user interfaces for improved transient sky analysis.

Findings

Enables rapid identification of interesting transient phenomena.

Provides multiwavelength and multimessenger contextualization.

Enhances discovery potential for transient observations.

Abstract

Astro-COLIBRI is a novel tool that evaluates alerts of transient observations in real time, filters them by user-specified criteria, and puts them into their multiwavelength and multimessenger context. Through fast generation of an overview of persistent sources as well as transient events in the relevant phase space, Astro-COLIBRI contributes to an enhanced discovery potential of both serendipitous and follow-up observations of the transient sky. The software's architecture comprises a Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface, both a static and a real-time database, a cloud-based alert system, as well as a website and apps for iOS and Android as clients for users. The latter provide a graphical representation with a summary of the relevant data to allow for the fast identification of interesting phenomena along with an assessment of observing conditions at a large selection of observatories around the world.