Lasair: The Transient Alert Broker for LSST:UK
K. Smith, Roy D. Williams, David R. Young, A. Ibsen, Stephen J. Smartt, Andy Lawrence, D. Morris, S. Voutsinas, M. Nicholl · Research Notes of the AAS · 2019
When LSST begins surveying the sky, it is expected to produce a stream of up to 10^7 transients per night. This time domain stream of data will need to be rapidly mined, with digestible alerts produced in a timely manner. Since early 2018, the Zwicky Transient Factory (ZTF) has been producing alerts at a rate of up to 10^6 per night. The alerts are publicly available to any brokers that are willing to consume and distribute them. We present Lasair - the LSST:UK Transient Broker, a prototype interface to a relational database of explosive and eruptive transients based on the ZTF transient stream. ZTF detections are assimilated into objects, lightcurves rendered and objects are context crossmatched with large star and galaxy catalogues. Some example filtered streams of objects are provided, and optional registration allows users to be alerted when transients are detected close to objects of interest. The database can be viewed via a web browser, and can also be queried via SQL and Jupyter notebooks. Additionally, as previously done with PS1 and ATLAS data, Lasair will be able to trigger alerts for ZTF transients within the high probability localisation regions of GW event skymaps.