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

DO Jones, P McGill, TA Manning, A Gagliano… - arXiv preprint arXiv …, 2024 - arxiv.org
Astrophysics paper astro-ph.HE Suggest

… 2 kpc of the transient location by using the Prospector Bayesian inference framework, with an acceleration in evaluation speed achieved via simulation-based inference. …

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BibTeX

@article{2410.17322v1,
Author        = {D. O. Jones and P. McGill and T. A. Manning and A. Gagliano and B. Wang and D. A. Coulter and R. J. Foley and G. Narayan and V. A. Villar and L. Braff and A. W. Engel and D. Farias and Z. Lai and K. Loertscher and J. Kutcka and S. Thorp and J. Vazquez},
Title         = {Blast: a Web Application for Characterizing the Host Galaxies of
  Astrophysical Transients},
Eprint        = {2410.17322v1},
ArchivePrefix = {arXiv},
PrimaryClass  = {astro-ph.HE},
Abstract      = {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/.},
Year          = {2024},
Month         = {Oct},
Url           = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2410.17322v1},
File          = {2410.17322v1.pdf}
}

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