Presto-Color: A Photometric Survey Cadence for Explosive Physics and Fast Transients
Abstract
We identify minimal observing cadence requirements that enable photometric astronomical surveys to detect and recognize fast and explosive transients and fast transient features. Observations in two different filters within a short time window (e.g., g-and-i, or r-and-z, within <0.5 hr) and a repeat of one of those filters with a longer time window (e.g., >1.5 hr) are desirable for this purpose. Such an observing strategy delivers both the color and light curve evolution of transients on the same night. This allows the identification and initial characterization of fast transient—or fast features of longer timescale transients—such as rapidly declining supernovae, kilonovae, and the signatures of SN ejecta interacting with binary companion stars or circumstellar material. Some of these extragalactic transients are intrinsically rare and generally all hard to find, thus upcoming surveys like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) could dramatically improve our understanding of their origin and properties. We colloquially refer to such a strategy implementation for the LSST as the Presto-Color strategy (rapid-color). This cadence's minimal requirements allow for overall optimization of a survey for other science goals.
Additional Information
© 2019 The Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Received 2019 February 4; accepted 2019 March 5; published 2019 April 25. This work was developed within the Transients and Variable Stars Science Collaboration (TVS) and the author acknowledges the support of TVS in the preparation of this paper. The authors acknowledge support from the Flatiron Institute, Heising-Simons Foundation, and LSST Corporation for the development of this paper. Research support to IA is provided by the GROWTH (Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen) project funded by the National Science Foundation Partnership in International Research Program under NSF PIRE grant number 1545949. P.S.C. is grateful for support provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant #HST-HF2-51404.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. G.N. is supported by the Lasker Fellowship at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Software: scikit-earn (Pedregosa et al. 2011), sncosmo (Aarbary 2014), Opsim (Delgado et al. 2014), MAF (Jones et al. 2014), astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013; Price-Whelan et al. 2018).Attached Files
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Additional details
- Alternative title
- Presto-Color: An LSST Cadence for Explosive Physics & Fast Transients
- Eprint ID
- 94963
- DOI
- 10.1088/1538-3873/ab121a
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190425-102441856
- Flatiron Institute
- Heising-Simons Foundation
- LSST Corporation
- OISE-1545949
- NSF
- HST-HF2-51404.001-A
- NASA Hubble Fellowship
- NAS 5-26555
- NASA
- Space Telescope Science Institute
- Created
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2019-04-25Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field