Objective of the workshop: To introduce the transient sky exploration with the help of the Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
Background: The Vera C. Rubin observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is an international project that has started exploring the Universe by mapping out a large part of the observable sky over a number of epochs in 6 different broadband filters from Chile. It is enabling the exploration of the transient sky to unprecedented depths, reaching an i-band limit of ~24.5 mag. Rubin LSST’s wide, fast, and deep observations will provide a real-time movie of the sky and its data will allow better understanding of the Universe, a deeper insight into the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, and an exploration of the unknowns.
The key science goal is to maximize the scientific return for all transient and variable phenomena from the Rubin LSST data. In particular,
- explore the full diversity of transient and variable phenomena in the Universe with discoveries of anomalies and true novelties,
- characterise periodic (e.g., pulsators, eclipsing binaries), eruptive (e.g. young stars, flares), and explosive (e.g, supernovae, tidal disruption events) phenomena,
- map structure, distances, and formation history of the Milky Way and the Local Volume using variable stars (and other time-domain signals),
- use time-domain events as cosmological and astrophysical probes—e.g., for dark energy, large-scale structure, or the distance scale,
- and enable rapid alerting, classification and follow-up of transient events.
The Rubin India participation group is an informal group of scientists from six different institutes (IUCAA, TIFR, NCRA, IIA, IIT Indore, and IISER Pune) with rights to data from the Rubin LSST. Many of these scientists have a variety of interests in the transient
domain with LSST. The survey will make transient objects public within 60s of data collection and more details such as light curves and cutout images within 24 hours. This will allow the wider astronomy community in India to also carry out scientific analyses which require familiarity with the data products that LSST will provide.
This workshop would be the second Rubin capacity building ASI workshop.
Rationale:
The main goals of the workshop are:
- to introduce the Rubin LSST and the current status,
- to understand lessons learnt from existing surveys like ZTF and explore advantage of incorporating inputs from future surveys such as Roman,
- to introduce the different data products made publicly available by the Rubin science collaboration,
- practical demonstration of the use of the various alert brokers that disseminate the Rubin data.
- brainstorm ideas to collaboratively follow up on transients using Indian facilities.
Format of the meeting: We will divide the workshop into 4 main sections along the lines of the main goals of the workshop indicated above. The morning session will cover the first two goals and we will invite prominent speakers from the Rubin LSST collaboration and keep ample time for question-and-answer sessions and discussions. The next two sessions will feature talks demonstrating the practical usage of Rubin data. The last session will be a tutorial for the use of the Rubin science pipeline on precursor data.
We expect to host up to 125 participants in the in person session.
Proposers: Anupam Bhardwaj, Anupreeta More, Surhud More, Ashish Mahabal (IUCAA) Kuntal Misra, Jeewan Chandra Pandey, Shashi Bhushan Pandey, Suvendu Rakshit (ARIES)