Introducing ANTARES 1.0

To prepare for the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and its coming deluge of time domain events, NOIRLab’s Community Science and Data Center (CSDC) has been developing an alert broker, ANTARES, that enables astronomers to receive and filter event notifications (alerts) from surveys and allows people who run surveys to distribute their alerts to the community.

The ANTARES team is excited to announce that we are out of beta and ANTARES 1.0 is now generally available at https://antares.noirlab.edu! Thank you to everyone who has used ANTARES over the past years and offered feedback, support and encouragement. This new release comprises a brand-new website, new tools for accessing our data holdings, and database improvements that greatly expand our scientific capabilities.

About ANTARES

ANTARES is an alert broker that currently processes and distributes data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) time-domain survey. Scientists in the community can submit “filters” to ANTARES—bits of Python code that run on alerts in real time. Community members have already submitted filters that do everything from flagging alerts in M31, to identifying transient events with machine learning classifiers, to searching for the source of gravitational waves by cross-matching alerts with LIGO candidates in real time. In the future we plan to ingest data from other surveys, including LSST.

Using a Python library called the ANTARES Client, scientists can stream data that their filters mark as interesting. People are already using this feature to build local databases for their own research interests and to support rapid follow-up observation of short-lived transient events.

The ANTARES team and collaboration has submitted more than 30 ATELs (Astronomer’s Telegrams) in the past year, confirming transient objects flagged by ANTARES filters—and discovered many more interesting candidates that have yet to be confirmed spectroscopically.

In addition to real-time processing, ANTARES hosts a searchable archive of ZTF data. The archive includes the original alerts as well as annotations made by filters and cross-matches with a number of different catalogs.

We’ve also published documentation and tutorials about streaming data from ANTARES and writing filters for ANTARES.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback, please join our Slack channel or send an email to nwolf@noao.edu.

Acknowledgments. The ANTARES team gratefully acknowledges financial support from the National Science Foundation through a cooperative agreement with the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) for the operation of NOIRLab, through an NSF INSPIRE grant to the University of Arizona (CISE AST-1344024, PI: R. Snodgrass), and through a grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation (2018-0909, PI: T. Matheson).