CaltechAUTHORS
Published August 2023 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

A Data Science Platform to Enable Time-domain Astronomy

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon University of Minnesota
  • 2. ROR icon University of California, Berkeley
  • 3. ROR icon Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  • 4. ROR icon Astrophysique Relativiste, Théories, Expériences, Métrologie, Instrumentation, Signaux
  • 5. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 6. Weights and Biases, Inc., 1479 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA 90063, USA
  • 7. ROR icon Leonardo da Vinci Engineering School
  • 8. EnergyHub, Inc., 41 Flatbush Avenue, Suite 400A, Brooklyn, NY 11217, USA
  • 9. ROR icon Goddard Space Flight Center
  • 10. ROR icon University of Washington
  • 11. ROR icon University of Ouagadougou
  • 12. ROR icon Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • 13. ROR icon Northeastern University
  • 14. ROR icon Laboratoire de Physique des 2 Infinis Irène Joliot-Curie
  • 15. ROR icon Liverpool John Moores University
  • 16. ROR icon Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
  • 17. ROR icon Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
  • 18. ROR icon Stockholm University
  • 19. ROR icon University of Paris

Abstract

SkyPortal is an open-source software package designed to discover interesting transients efficiently, manage follow-up, perform characterization, and visualize the results. By enabling fast access to archival and catalog data, crossmatching heterogeneous data streams, and the triggering and monitoring of on-demand observations for further characterization, a SkyPortal-based platform has been operating at scale for >2 yr for the Zwicky Transient Facility Phase II community, with hundreds of users, containing tens of millions of time-domain sources, interacting with dozens of telescopes, and enabling community reporting. While SkyPortal emphasizes rich user experiences across common front-end workflows, recognizing that scientific inquiry is increasingly performed programmatically, SkyPortal also surfaces an extensive and well-documented application programming interface system. From back-end and front-end software to data science analysis tools and visualization frameworks, the SkyPortal design emphasizes the reuse and leveraging of best-in-class approaches, with a strong extensibility ethos. For instance, SkyPortal now leverages ChatGPT large language models to generate and surface source-level human-readable summaries automatically. With the imminent restart of the next generation of gravitational-wave detectors, SkyPortal now also includes dedicated multimessenger features addressing the requirements of rapid multimessenger follow-up: multitelescope management, team/group organizing interfaces, and crossmatching of multimessenger data streams with time-domain optical surveys, with interfaces sufficiently intuitive for newcomers to the field. This paper focuses on the detailed implementations, capabilities, and early science results that establish SkyPortal as a community software package ready to take on the data science challenges and opportunities presented by this next chapter in the multimessenger era.

Copyright and License

© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

The authors appreciate comments from Dave Coulter, Fabian Schussler, and the anomymous referee on an initial draft of this paper.

M.W.C., J.L., and V.S. are supported by the National Science Foundation with grant No. OAC-2117997; M.W.C. is also supported by PHY-2010970. M.W.C. and R.W.K. were supported by the Preparing for Astrophysics with LSST Program, funded by the Heising–Simons Foundation through grant 2021-2975, and administered by Las Cumbres Observatory. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, through both the Data-driven Investigator Program and a dedicated grant to develop SkyPortal, provided critical funding for this project without which this project could not have succeeded. J.S.B., G.N., A.C-Q., and D.A.D. were partially supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. B.P. thanks the Northeastern Lawrence Co-op Fellowship for their continuous support. J.P. thanks LSST-France and CNRS/IN2P3 for supporting Fink. The Kilonova-Catcher program is supported by the IdEx Université de Paris Cité ANR-18-IDEX-0001 and the MITI CNRS Sciences participative program.

Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48 inch and the 60 inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. AST-2034437 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Trinity College Dublin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, IN2P3, University of Warwick, Ruhr University Bochum and Northwestern University. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW.

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Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2305.00108 (arXiv)

Funding

National Science Foundation
OAC-2117997
National Science Foundation
PHY-2010970
Heising–Simons Foundation
2021-2975
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
GBMF4550
Agence Nationale de la Recherche
ANR-18-IDEX-0001
National Science Foundation
AST-2034437

Dates

Submitted
2023-04-28
Accepted
2023-06-14
Available
2023-07-31
Published

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Astronomy Department, Center for Data-Driven Discovery (CDDD), Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), Owens Valley Radio Observatory, Zwicky Transient Facility, Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
Publication Status
Published