Enabling Science from the Rubin Alert Stream with Lasair

Roy D. Williams*, Gareth P. Francis, Andy Lawrence, Terence M. Sloan, Stephen J. Smartt, Ken W. Smith, David R. Young

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

Lasair is the UK Community Broker for transient alerts from the Legacy Survey of Space and Time from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. We explain the system's capabilities, how users can achieve their scientific goals, and how Lasair is implemented. Lasair offers users a kit of parts that they can use to build filters to concentrate their desired alerts. The kit has novel light-curve features, sky context, watchlists of special sky objects and regions of the sky, dynamic cross-matching with catalogues of known astronomical sources, and classifications and annotations from other users and partner projects. These resources can be shared with other users, copied, and modified. Lasair offers real-time machine-to-machine notifications of filtered transient alerts. Even though the Rubin Observatory is not yet complete, Lasair is a mature system: it has been processing and serving data from the similarly formatted stream of the Zwicky Transient Facility alerts.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)362-371
Number of pages10
Journal RAS Techniques and Instruments
Volume3
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 11 Jul 2024

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Lasair
  • Rubin
  • Software
  • Transient

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