Continuous Wide-Field Optical Monitoring for Very Early-Phase Transient Discovery

TL;DR

This paper advocates for continuous wide-field optical monitoring to detect and study transient astrophysical events from their very onset, enabling new insights into multimessenger phenomena and complementing traditional survey methods.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of continuous optical monitoring as a means to capture the earliest phases of transients, bridging the gap between electromagnetic and multimessenger observations.

Findings

Enables detection of transients at their physical onset.

Facilitates early electromagnetic follow-up for multimessenger events.

Supports diverse applications like planetary defense and stellar variability.

Abstract

The study of transient phenomena in a multimessenger context is expected to remain a major pillar of astrophysical discovery in the decades ahead. Supernovae, Kilonovae, Black-Hole formation, Novae, GRBs, and tidal disruption events are prime examples, as their earliest phases link electromagnetic radiation to gravitational waves, neutrinos, and high-energy emission. Yet, the physics connecting these messengers unfolds within minutes to hours, while traditional surveys revisit the same region of the sky on the scale of days/weeks, missing when the event begins. Current survey facilities excel at answering what happened and how often, but essentially fail in addressing how it happened and how it couples to gravitational waves, neutrinos, or high-energy emission. Continuous wide-area optical monitoring, as proposed here, removes this limitation. The traditional approach, where a GW or neutrino alert triggers electromagnetic follow-up, is now complemented, and sometimes reversed: early electromagnetic discoveries can prompt searches for weaker gravitational waves or neutrino signals that would otherwise be missed. In the Einstein Telescope era, wide-field optical monitoring will allow us to find the optical counterparts of gravitational-wave events and understand their physics. At the same time, a telescope capable of continuous monitoring provides immediate scientific value for planetary defense, space-debris tracking, stellar variability, exoplanets transit monitoring, accretion-driven activity, and when we step into a new observational territory, the true discoveries are often the ones we did not expect. In this vision, continuous time-domain astronomy does not replace classical surveys: it completes them by supplying the missing temporal dimension. Follow-up observations remain essential, but they now begin at the physical onset of the event rather than after its evolution is underway.