Give Me a Few Hours: Exploring Short Timescales in Rubin Observatory Cadence Simulations

Creators: Bellm, Eric C.; Burke, Colin J.; Coughlin, Michael W.; Andreoni, Igor; Raiteri, Claudia M.; Bonito, Rosaria

Abstract

The limiting temporal resolution of a time-domain survey in detecting transient behavior is set by the time between observations of the same sky area. We analyze the distribution of visit separations for a range of Vera C. Rubin Observatory cadence simulations. Simulations from families v1.5–v1.7.1 are strongly peaked at the 22 minute visit pair separation and provide effectively no constraint on temporal evolution within the night. This choice will necessarily prevent Rubin from discovering a wide range of astrophysical phenomena in time to trigger rapid follow-up. We present a science-agnostic metric to supplement detailed simulations of fast-evolving transients and variables and suggest potential approaches for improving the range of timescales explored.

Additional Information

© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2021 October 4; revised 2021 December 10; accepted 2021 December 21; published 2022 January 10. We thank Lynne Jones, Peter Yoachim, and Mario Juric for useful discussions, as well as the anonymous reviewer for helpful suggestions that improved the clarity of the manuscript. This paper was created in the Rubin LSST Transient and Variable Star (TVS) Science Collaboration. 15 The authors acknowledge the support of the Vera C. Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time Transient and Variable Stars Science Collaboration that provided opportunities for collaboration and exchange of ideas and knowledge and of Rubin Observatory in the creation and implementation of this work. This work was supported by the Preparing for Astrophysics with LSST Program, funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation through grant 2021-2975 and administered by Las Cumbres Observatory. The authors also acknowledge the support of the LSST Corporation, which enabled the organization of workshops and hackathons throughout the cadence optimization process by directing private funding to these activities. This research uses services or data provided by the Astro Data Lab at NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory. NOIRLab is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. E.C.B. gratefully acknowledges support from the NSF AAG grant 1812779 and grant No. 2018-0908 from the Heising-Simons Foundation. E.C.B. acknowledges further support from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is supported in part by the National Science Foundation through Cooperative Agreement 1258333 managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), and the Department of Energy under contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515 with the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Additional LSST funding comes from private donations, grants to universities, and in-kind support from LSSTC Institutional Members. Software: LSST Metrics Analysis Framework (MAF; Jones et al. 2014), Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018), Numpy (van der Walt et al. 2011; Harris et al. 2020), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), healpy (Górski et al. 2005; Zonca et al. 2019).

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