This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Dr. Djorgovski and his team will use the data stream from the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) to search for transient astronomical objects including flare stars, gamma-ray bursts, and strong microlensing events. That survey uses two wide-field telescopes in Arizona and one in Australia to catalog objects in the Solar System, particularly asteroids on orbits that bring them close to Earth. The team will build an open optical-transient discovery engine to compare image from CSS with earlier images of the same piece of sky and identify sources that have brightened. The team will provide the resulting data stream on a public server accessed by Virtual Observatory protocols, so that it is available to the wider community for immediate followup observations.
Graduate and undergraduate students will be trained by participating in the research. The team plans to work with Microsoft's World Wide Telescope project to present the event stream in a form accessible to amateur astronomers and the general public. This project will be the first that allows rapid followup of such a wide range of bright transient sources, and can act as a testbed to develop scientific strategies and procedures. The resulting science is potentially transformative, and will inform decisions on building and operating future facilities such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.
