Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Smith, K. W.
• Smartt, S. J.
• Young, D. R.
• Tonry, J. L.
• Denneau, L.
• Flewelling, H.
• Heinze, A. N.
• Weiland, H. J.
• Stalder, B.
• Rest, A.
• Stubbs, C. W.
• Anderson, J. P.
• Chen, T.-W
• Clark, P.
• Do, A.
• Förster, F.
• Fulton, M.
• Gillanders, J.
• McBrien, O. R.
• O'Neill, D.
• Srivastav, S.
• Wright, D. E.

Titel

Design and Operation of the ATLAS Transient Science Server

Ist Teil von

• Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2020-08, Vol.132 (1014), p.1-22

Ort / Verlag

Philadelphia: The Astronomical Society of the Pacific

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The Asteroid Terrestrial impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) system consists of two 0.5 m Schmidt telescopes with cameras covering 29 square degrees at plate scale of 1.86 arcsec per pixel. Working in tandem, the telescopes routinely survey the whole sky visible from Hawaii (above δ > − 50 ° ) every two nights, exposing four times per night, typically reaching o < 19 magnitude per exposure when the moon is illuminated and c < 19.5 magnitude per exposure in dark skies. Construction is underway of two further units to be sited in Chile and South Africa which will result in an all-sky daily cadence from 2021. Initially designed for detecting potentially hazardous near earth objects, the ATLAS data enable a range of astrophysical time domain science. To extract transients from the data stream requires a computing system to process the data, assimilate detections in time and space and associate them with known astrophysical sources. Here we describe the hardware and software infrastructure to produce a stream of clean, real, astrophysical transients in real time. This involves machine learning and boosted decision tree algorithms to identify extragalactic and Galactic transients. Typically we detect 10-15 supernova candidates per night which we immediately announce publicly. The ATLAS discoveries not only enable rapid follow-up of interesting sources but will provide complete statistical samples within the local volume of 100 Mpc. A simple comparison of the detected supernova rate within 100 Mpc, with no corrections for completeness, is already significantly higher (factor 1.5 to 2) than the current accepted rates.