Astro-COLIBRI: A Comprehensive Platform for Real-Time Multi-Messenger Astrophysics

TL;DR

Astro-COLIBRI is a comprehensive, real-time platform that integrates multi-messenger astrophysical alerts, providing rapid contextualization, visualization, and observatory conditions to enhance transient phenomena follow-up.

Contribution

It introduces a new integrated platform combining real-time alerts, multi-wavelength data, and observatory info, with recent enhancements like automatic photometric data collection.

Findings

Real-time processing of multi-messenger alerts

Enhanced data visualization and contextualization

Improved follow-up capabilities with new photometric data integration

Abstract

The detection of transient phenomena such as Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), stellar flares, novae, and supernovae, alongside novel cosmic messengers like high-energy neutrinos and gravitational waves, has transformed astrophysics in recent years. Maximizing the discovery potential of multi-messenger and multi-wavelength follow-up observations, as well as serendipitous detections, requires a tool that rapidly compiles and contextualizes relevant information for each new event. We present Astro-COLIBRI, an advanced platform designed to meet this challenge. Astro-COLIBRI integrates a public RESTful API, real-time databases, a cloud-based alert system, and user-friendly clients (a website and mobile apps for iOS and Android). It processes astronomical alerts from multiple streams in real time, filtering them based on user-defined criteria and placing them in their multi-wavelength and multi-messenger context. The platform offers intuitive data visualization, a quick summary of relevant event properties, and an assessment of observing conditions at numerous observatories worldwide. We here describe its architecture, data resources, and main functionalities. We highlight the automatic collection of photometric data from a variety of large scale optical surveys, a recently added feature that significantly improves the capabilities of the Astro-COLIBRI platform.