ANTARES Now Filtering and Streaming ZTF Alerts

Tom Matheson, NOAO

The keenly anticipated era of large-scale time-domain surveys has arrived! The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is now generating hundreds of thousands of public alerts each night. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will produce several million alerts each night over its ten-year lifetime, is rapidly approaching the beginning of commissioning and full-scale operations are just three years away. This volume of time-domain events is well beyond the capacity of individual astronomers to sort through, identify, and prioritize. As described in previous NOAO newsletters (March 2014, April 2018), astronomers at NOAO and computer scientists from the University of Arizona are engaged in a collaboration to build a software infrastructure tool that will automatically process, filter, and distribute alerts from these surveys. This is the ANTARES (Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System) project.

The ANTARES system is currently active and filtering alerts from ZTF. Once registered at the ANTARES web site, users can access different streams of alerts. As of this writing, eight streams are available:

• Extragalactic
• M31
• nuclear transients (transients close to the center of a galaxy)
• high signal-to-noise ratio
• high brightness
• high amplitude
• high amplitude variable stars, and
• known Solar System objects.

The streams are available on the ANTARES web page, via a Slack channel, and through Apache Kafka streaming technology. We provide a toolkit to access these Kafka streams. In addition, users can create watch lists of objects that will provide direct notifications if the objects change enough to generate an alert.

We will continue to add capabilities. We have just deployed a development kit for filters that will enable user-supplied filters. In the immediate future, new features will include a searchable database of alerts and ingestion of alerts from time-domain surveys other than ZTF. Our main goal is to enable time-domain science for our community. If you are interested in using the system, developing filters, or engaging with us in any other way, please contact the ANTARES team at antares_help@noao.edu.