ALeRCE Project

With the emergence of large telescopes and astronomy cameras, the community of astronomers requires the implementation of a new generation of astronomy brokers, which are systems that serve as intermediaries between large survey telescopes, those that monitor the sky searching for new astrophysical events, and follow-up telescopes, those that observe interesting events to characterize them and understand their physical properties. Currently, these telescopes can produce up to 1 million events per night and are expected to reach up to 10 million events per night in the upcoming years. These events must be distributed among the community through the transmission of data streams so they may be captured, annotated and classified by astronomy brokers.

Description of the service

ALeRCE is one of the first astronomy brokers in the world and the first to publicly provide the classification of astronomical alerts generated by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), located in California. ALeRCE offers multiple services to the community of astronomers, including the intake of ZTF data streams to classify events based on the first alerts associated to them (early classifier) and another one based on the temporal evolution of all alerts associated to an event (late classifier), using machine learning techniques in both cases.
ALeRCE allows automatic communication between its databases and survey telescopes through API, and it also offers different public web interfaces for searching new supernova candidates (snhunter.alerce.online), or for exploring all of the time series and their classifications (alerce.online), among other services.

Country of origin

Chile

Geographic scope of operations

"Operations: Chile Users: Chile, the United States, Brazil, Argentina and some countries in Europe."

Website

http://alerce.science

Type of executing entity

Project

Sector/industry

Education

Stakeholders involved

"Funding: Instituto Milenio de Astrofísica, Centro de Modelamiento Matemático Chilean Partners: National University Network or Red Universitaria Nacional (REUNA), Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Universidad Andrés Bello, Universidad Austral, Universidad Católi