Lasair is a broker for astronomers studying transient and variable astrophysical sources.
It is being developed as a collaboration between the
University of Edinburgh and
Queen's University, Belfast
to build a broker service for alerts generated by the
Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the
Vera Rubin Telescope.
We are planning to serve LSST transient alerts to the LSST user community and combine
these data with value-added cross-matches against existing catalogues and analysis tools.
To help prototype the functionality needed to process alerts from LSST,
Lasair is currently ingesting and presenting alerts from the public stream of the
Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF),
which is releasing a transient alert stream in a format similar to that envisaged for LSST.
We thank ZTF for access to this valuable public data stream.
Lasair provides a broker system for users to access, visualise and extract science data.
To find out what Lasair can do and how to use it, please look at the About Lasair link
to the left, and the Lasair Cookbook.
Lasair 2.0
On 9th April 2020 we released the stable, functioning version 2.0 of the Lasair broker for
processing ZTF alerts. The additions and improvements in this release are
- Documentation as above
- A new, upgraded version of the context classifier Sherlock Version 2.0
- We provide a forward look to our broad plans to develop Lasair for the LSST alert stream
- Lasair provides Kafka output for query/filters: contact us for more information.
If you make use of this, please cite our paper:
Lasair: The Transient Alert Broker for LSST:UK K. W. Smith, R. D. Williams et. al., Research Notes AAS,
3,26 (2019).
Acknowledgements
Lasair is supported by the UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council and is a
collaboration between the University of Edinburgh (grant ST/N002512/1) and
Queen’s University Belfast (grant ST/N002520/1)
within the LSST:UK Science Consortium.
ZTF is supported by National Science Foundation grant AST-1440341
and a collaboration including
Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at
Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington,
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, Los Alamos National Laboratories,
the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW.
This research has made use of ``Aladin sky atlas'' developed at CDS, Strasbourg Observatory, France 2000A\&AS..143...33B and 2014ASPC..485..277B.