VOEventNet: Real-Time Astronomy with a Rapid-Response Telescope Grid

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a three-year, $600,000 award to create a cyberinfrastructure to enable rapid and federated observations of the dynamic night sky, entitled “VOEventNet”. Researchers at CACR, UC Berkeley, and Los Alamos National Laboratory are funded to build an event factory to detect sky transients in near real time, and use novel machine-learning technology to distinguish scientifically relevant transients from false positives through synthesizing multiple observations. Exploration of transient sources represents one of the last frontiers in modern astrophysics. The development of a comprehensive understanding of a new event requires real-time observation with multiple instruments. Yet while telescope facilities continue to ramp up to unprecedented data rates, there has been no concerted effort to ensure real-time communications of astronomical events. A federated response must be enabled to push transient astrophysics ahead in the 21st century. VOEventNet will be a driving force for a rapidly growing new area of astronomical inquiry, eventually serving as a transparent backbone to enable pan-facility communication.

VOEventNet will enable an already active area of astrophysical research to flourish. The system is not just research with the hope of a prototype, but the unification of existing powerful resources to form a new, robust, competent production system that will generate a great deal of new science. VOEventNet is a network of telescopes and computers working synergistically, under the watchful eye of humans, to find and study interesting astronomical events. VOEventNet is a transportation of events to interested subscribers, automatically in seconds or minutes after discovery. For more information about the project, please see the project website.