We describe the Arizona-NOIRLab Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES), a software instrument designed to process large-scale streams of astronomical time-domain alerts. With the advent of large-format CCDs on wide-field imaging telescopes, time-domain surveys now routinely discover tens of thousands of new events each night, more than can be evaluated by astronomers alone. The ANTARES event broker will process alerts, annotating them with catalog associations and filtering them to distinguish customizable subsets of events. We describe the data model of the system, the overall architecture, annotation, implementation of filters, system outputs, provenance tracking, system performance, and the user interface.
We present time-series imaging polarimetry observations of a nearby tidal disruption event (TDE) AT2019DSG at z = 0.0512 to probe the disruption mechanism and shed light on the accretion process. We obtain linear polarimetry using the Alhambra Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera on board the 2.5 m Nordic Optical Telescope. Our observations showed a polarization at the 9.2% ± 2.7% level early on, decreasing to less than 2.7% (at the 68% confidence level) one month later. While the high level of polarization in the early epoch is similar to that of Swift J164449.3+573451 and Swift J2058+0516, the low level of polarization in the later epoch is in agreement with that of OGLE16aaa. Our results thus show the temporal evolution of optical polarization from a TDE. As the degree of polarization changes over time, it is unlikely to be attributed to host galaxy dust, but may originate from a non-isotropic accreting disk, or associated with the relativistic jet emission.
Ongoing large-scale optical time-domain surveys, such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), are producing alerts at unprecedented rates. Analysis of transient sources has so far followed two distinct paths: archival analysis of data on transient sources at a time when they are no longer observable and real-time analysis at the time when the sources are first detected. The latter is the realm of alert brokers such as the Arizona-NOIRLab Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES). In this paper, we synthesize the two analysis paths and present a first systematic study of archival alert-broker data, focusing on extragalactic transients with multipeaked light curves identified in the ANTARES archive of ZTF alerts. Our analysis yields a sample of 37 such sources, including core-collapse supernovae (with two analogs of iPTF14hls), thermonuclear supernovae interacting with their surrounding circumstellar medium, tidal disruption events, luminous blue variables, and as yet unclassified objects. A large fraction of the identified sources is currently active, warranting allocation of follow-up resources in the immediate future to further constrain their nature and the physical processes at work.
The ongoing Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey is generating a massive alert rate from a variety of optical transients and variable stars, which are being filtered down to subsets meeting user-specified criteria by broker systems such as the Arizona-NOIRLab Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES). In a beta implementation of the algorithm of Soraisam et al. on ANTARES, we flagged AT 2020iko from the ZTF real-time alert stream as an anomalous source. This source is located close to a red extended Sloan Digital Sky Survey source. In the first few epochs of detection, it exhibited a V-shaped brightness profile, preceded by nondetections both in ZTF and in the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae extending to 2014. Its full light curve shows a precursor event, followed by a main superoutburst and at least two rebrightenings. A low-resolution spectrum of this source points to a dwarf nova (DN) nature. Although some of the features of AT 2020iko indicate an SU UMa-type DN, its large amplitude, presence of rebrightenings, and inferred supercycle period of ≥6 yr are in favor of AT 2020iko being a new WZ Sge-type DN candidate, a subset of rare DNe consisting of extreme mass-ratio (<0.1) binaries with an orbital period around the period minimum. The precusor event of AT 2020iko brightened by 6.5 mag, while its decay spanned 3–5 mag. We speculate this superoutburst is associated with a less expanded accretion disk than in typical superoutbursts in WZ Sge systems, with the large depth of the precursor decay implying an extremely small mass ratio. To the best of our knowledge, such a precursor event has not been recorded for any DN. This result serves to demonstrate the efficacy of our real-time anomaly search algorithm.
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