Architecture of Tianyu Software: Relative Photometry as a Case Study

TL;DR

This paper presents the architecture of the Tianyu software pipeline, demonstrating its high scalability and efficiency in processing astronomical data for exoplanet and variable star detection, with successful tests on real observational data.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, flexible software architecture for astronomical data processing, specifically tailored for the Tianyu telescope, with demonstrated high throughput and detection capabilities.

Findings

Pipeline achieves up to 257% increased throughput with 5 consumers.

Successfully detects transiting exoplanets and variable stars in real data.

Near-theoretical photometric precision in light curves.

Abstract

Tianyu telescope, an one-meter robotic optical survey instrument to be constructed in Lenghu, Qinghai, China, is designed for detecting transiting exoplanets, variable stars and transients. It requires a highly automated, optimally distributed, easily extendable, and highly flexible software to enable the data processing for the raw data at rates exceeding 500MB/s. In this work, we introduce the architecture of the Tianyu pipeline and use relative photometry as a case to demonstrate its high scalability and efficiency. This pipeline is tested on the data collected from Muguang observatory and Xinglong observatory. The pipeline demonstrates high scalability, with most processing stages increasing in throughput as the number of consumers grows. Compared to a single consumer, the median throughput of image calibration, alignment, and flux extraction increases by 41%, 257%, and 107% respectively when using 5 consumers, while image stacking exhibits limited scalability due to I/O constraints. In our tests, the pipeline was able to detect two transiting sources. Besides, the pipeline captures variability in the light curves of nine known and two previously unknown variable sources in the testing data. Meanwhile, the differential photometric precision of the light curves is near the theoretical limitation. These results indicate that this pipeline is suitable for detecting transiting exoplanets and variable stars. This work builds the fundation for further development of Tianyu software. Code of this work is available at https://github.com/ruiyicheng/Tianyu_pipeline.