Blast: a Web Application for Characterizing the Host Galaxies of Astrophysical Transients

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jones, D. O., McGill, P., Manning, T. A., Gagliano, A., Wang, B., Coulter, D. A., Foley, R. J., Narayan, G., Villar, V. A., Braff, L., Engel, A. W., Farias, D., Lai, Z., Loertscher, K., Kutcka, J., Thorp, S., Vazquez, J.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914984524513280
author Jones, D. O.
McGill, P.
Manning, T. A.
Gagliano, A.
Wang, B.
Coulter, D. A.
Foley, R. J.
Narayan, G.
Villar, V. A.
Braff, L.
Engel, A. W.
Farias, D.
Lai, Z.
Loertscher, K.
Kutcka, J.
Thorp, S.
Vazquez, J.
author_facet Jones, D. O.
McGill, P.
Manning, T. A.
Gagliano, A.
Wang, B.
Coulter, D. A.
Foley, R. J.
Narayan, G.
Villar, V. A.
Braff, L.
Engel, A. W.
Farias, D.
Lai, Z.
Loertscher, K.
Kutcka, J.
Thorp, S.
Vazquez, J.
contents Characterizing the host galaxies of astrophysical transients is important to many areas of astrophysics, including constraining the progenitor systems of core-collapse supernovae, correcting Type Ia supernova distances, and probabilistically classifying transients without photometric or spectroscopic data. Given the increasing transient discovery rate in the coming years, there is substantial utility in providing public, transparent, reproducible, and automatic characterization for large samples of transient host galaxies. Here we present Blast, a web application that ingests live streams of transient alerts, matches transients to their host galaxies, and performs photometry on coincident archival imaging data of the host galaxy. The photometry is then used to infer both global host-galaxy properties and galaxy properties within 2 kpc of the transient location by using the Prospector Bayesian inference framework, with an acceleration in evaluation speed achieved via simulation-based inference. Blast provides host-galaxy properties to users via a web browser or an application program interface. The software can be extended to support alternative photometric or SED-fitting algorithms, and can be scaled via an asynchronous worker queue across multiple compute nodes to handle the processing of large volumes of transient alerts for upcoming transient surveys. Blast has been ingesting newly discovered transients from the Transient Name Server since mid-2024, and has currently measured SED parameters for more than 6000 transients. The service is publicly available at https://blast.scimma.org/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_17322
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Blast: a Web Application for Characterizing the Host Galaxies of Astrophysical Transients
Jones, D. O.
McGill, P.
Manning, T. A.
Gagliano, A.
Wang, B.
Coulter, D. A.
Foley, R. J.
Narayan, G.
Villar, V. A.
Braff, L.
Engel, A. W.
Farias, D.
Lai, Z.
Loertscher, K.
Kutcka, J.
Thorp, S.
Vazquez, J.
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Characterizing the host galaxies of astrophysical transients is important to many areas of astrophysics, including constraining the progenitor systems of core-collapse supernovae, correcting Type Ia supernova distances, and probabilistically classifying transients without photometric or spectroscopic data. Given the increasing transient discovery rate in the coming years, there is substantial utility in providing public, transparent, reproducible, and automatic characterization for large samples of transient host galaxies. Here we present Blast, a web application that ingests live streams of transient alerts, matches transients to their host galaxies, and performs photometry on coincident archival imaging data of the host galaxy. The photometry is then used to infer both global host-galaxy properties and galaxy properties within 2 kpc of the transient location by using the Prospector Bayesian inference framework, with an acceleration in evaluation speed achieved via simulation-based inference. Blast provides host-galaxy properties to users via a web browser or an application program interface. The software can be extended to support alternative photometric or SED-fitting algorithms, and can be scaled via an asynchronous worker queue across multiple compute nodes to handle the processing of large volumes of transient alerts for upcoming transient surveys. Blast has been ingesting newly discovered transients from the Transient Name Server since mid-2024, and has currently measured SED parameters for more than 6000 transients. The service is publicly available at https://blast.scimma.org/.
title Blast: a Web Application for Characterizing the Host Galaxies of Astrophysical Transients
topic High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.17322