The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series (Jan 2023)

A Data Science Platform to Enable Time-domain Astronomy

  • Michael W. Coughlin,
  • Joshua S. Bloom,
  • Guy Nir,
  • Sarah Antier,
  • Theophile Jegou du Laz,
  • Stéfan van der Walt,
  • Arien Crellin-Quick,
  • Thomas Culino,
  • Dmitry A. Duev,
  • Daniel A. Goldstein,
  • Brian F. Healy,
  • Viraj Karambelkar,
  • Jada Lilleboe,
  • Kyung Min Shin,
  • Leo P. Singer,
  • Tomás Ahumada,
  • Shreya Anand,
  • Eric C. Bellm,
  • Richard Dekany,
  • Matthew J. Graham,
  • Mansi M. Kasliwal,
  • Ivona Kostadinova,
  • R. Weizmann Kiendrebeogo,
  • Shrinivas R. Kulkarni,
  • Sydney Jenkins,
  • Natalie LeBaron,
  • Ashish A. Mahabal,
  • James D. Neill,
  • B. Parazin,
  • Julien Peloton,
  • Daniel A. Perley,
  • Reed Riddle,
  • Ben Rusholme,
  • Jakob van Santen,
  • Jesper Sollerman,
  • Robert Stein,
  • D. Turpin,
  • Avery Wold,
  • Carla Amat,
  • Adrien Bonnefon,
  • Adrien Bonnefoy,
  • Manon Flament,
  • Frank Kerkow,
  • Sulekha Kishore,
  • Shloke Jani,
  • Stephen K. Mahanty,
  • Céline Liu,
  • Laura Llinares,
  • Jolyane Makarison,
  • Alix Olliéric,
  • Inès Perez,
  • Lydie Pont,
  • Vyom Sharma

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4365/acdee1
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 267, no. 2
p. 31

Abstract

Read online

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.

Keywords