Type: Talk
Session: Transient and Variable Star Science I
Author: Azalee Bostroem

Abstract: The Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will have over 10 million alerts per night. While LSST will be a great discovery and statistics machine, there will be transients for which we will want a more detailed dataset than the survey’s observing strategy can supply. This is especially true for nearby transients, for which we can collect the most robust datasets and which, depending on their proximity, might saturate in LSST images. With such a large nightly dataset, infrastructure that facilitates transient vetting and the initiation of follow-up observations is essential. Additionally, other surveys can supplement LSST’s cadence, especially for nearby objects, by prioritizing overlapping fields. The Distance Less Than 40 Mpc (DLT40) team has built an infrastructure to do these tasks, packaged as a website. For any object reported to the Transient Name Server that is within our field of view (a proxy for a filtered LSST alert stream from a broker), we create a candidate webpage that immediately tells us the visibility for our telescopes, which we can trigger with a single button. Additionally, for our own survey, we prioritize galaxies in the TESS footprint, giving us both ultra high-cadence light curves from TESS and multi-band imaging and spectroscopy from DLT40. Moving towards full automation, we have also implemented automated triggering of spectroscopy and photometry for the most promising candidates in the DLT40 survey, removing any delay due to human vetting. The synergy between LSST and other transient surveys will revolutionize our knowledge of explosive transients from eruptive mass loss in their red supergiant progenitors to shock breakout in core-collapse supernovae to the progenitor systems of thermonuclear explosions. I will present the infrastructure we have built which will enable us to collect a gold sample of nearby transients with LSST and highlight examples where we leveraged the combined information of DLT40+TESS to understand the early evolution of supernovae.