Astro-COLIBRI

General information

Astro-COLIBRI is an innovative platform designed to revolutionize the study of flaring astrophysical events by integrating real-time multi-messenger observation tools in a comprehensive, user-friendly graphical interface. By bundling and evaluating alerts about transient events from various channels, Astro-COLIBRI streamlines the process of coordinating follow-up observations, enabling professional and amateur astronomers alike to better understand the nature of these events through complementary observational data. Astro-COLIBRI supports a wide range of astrophysical source classes, including Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), Gamma-ray Bursts (GRBs), Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), Gravitational Waves (GWs), High-energy Neutrinos, Optical Transients (OT), Supernovae (SN), and more. By incorporating multi-messenger services, catalogs, lightcurves, and alerts from various observatories and systems, Astro-COLIBRI facilitates seamless collaboration and data sharing among the astronomy community.

Definitions
- Event times: UTC (precision: 1 second)
- Time resolution for visibility assessement: 1 minute (10min for multi-observatory visibility plot)
- Coordinates: Equatorial, J2000 (precision: 0.01 deg)
- Localisation uncertainties are taken from the discovery instruments (typically 90% CL)
- Sky map in equatorial coordinates is centered on RA=180deg
- Longitudes are negative toward West
- Image size on Pan-STARRS and SkyMapper: 0.05deg x 0.05deg
- Contour levels (e.g. GWs and Fermi-GBM) are 50% and 90%
- Science mode: the web frontend allows to activate a scientific interface providing additional information about each event, additional links to external ressources, and access to observability assessements

Notifications

For most streams, the notifications are sent as soon as the detection of the new transient is announced. In order to reduce the amount of information to a reasonable level, optical transients are only announced when their type is classified and announced via the Transient Name Server (TNS). This is often only done after additional (spectroscopic) observations, thus introducing a delay between the source detection and the Astro-COLIBRI notification that can range from hours to days (sometimes even weeks/months).
- GRBs : Fermi and Swift alerts (incl. names and identification)
- Neutrino : IceCube, AMON (e.g. Nu-EM coincidences), and SuperK supernova alerts
- GW : Advanced Ligo / Advanced VIRGO / KAGRA alerts (during O4, i.e. since May 2023)
- Significant GW: subset of the "GW" alerts with FAR < 1/month; indicated by an exclamation mark in the notification title
- NS/NSBH GW: subset of the "GW" alerts with P(NS) + P(NSBH) > 50%; indicated by "NS" in the notification title
- Well localized GWs: subset of the "GW" alerts with the 90% containment area < 100 deg^2
- SNe : optical transients characterized as supernova
- OTs : optical transients not classified as SNe (e.g. novae, CVs, TDE, AGN, etc.)
- Bright OTs : optical transients (SNe and OT) with magnitudes < 18 (i.e. a subset of the two categories above)
- Unistellar: bright and early optical transients selected by the Unistellar Citizen Science program
- FLaapLUC: GeV flares from AGNs observed by Fermi-LAT and detected by the FLaapLUC pipeline
- Burst : INTEGRAL and HAWC detections, FRBs, other un-categorized alerts, ...
- Special alerts : very rare alerts of special value, e.g. T CrB nova in 2024, a Galactic SN, ...
- Astro-COLIBRI announcements : News, updates and down times

Smart-home integration
You can integration Astro-COLIBRI into your smart-home setup to enable visual alerts using your smart-lights.
See smart-home integration for details.

Legend of observatories and event types
- Color scheme used to identify various observatories:
- Marker styles used to identify various types of events and sources

Available archival data
- 4FGL: Fermi-LAT 4FGL-DR3
- TeVCat: TeVCat catalog (status: March 2022)
- SGR/AXP: McGill Online Magnetar Catalog + recent announcements
- HMXB: HMXBwebcat, a catalogue of high-mass X-ray binaries in the Galaxy (v2024-08, Fortin et al. (2023) A&A 671, A149 (2023))
- LMXB: LMXBwebcat, a catalogue of low-mass X-ray binaries in the Galaxy (v2024-01, Fortin et al. (2024) A&A in press)
- IceCat-1: ICeCube catalog of high-energy neutrinos
- GRBs : Fermi, Swift and INTEGRAL detected GRBs (since January 2016)
- GWs : all alerts emitted during O3 (2019-04-01 until 2020-03-27) and O4 (2023-05-24 until tbd)
- Neutrinos : all publicly available alerts: HESE/EHE + Bronze/Gold astrotracks + Cascades (first alert: 2016-04-27)
- FRBs : all FRBs reported to TNS
- SNe + OTs: all classified events reported to TNS (official IAU repository since January 2016)
- unclassified optical transients reported to TNS (complete after mid-october 2023)
- AMON Nu-EM : all HAWC-IceCube coincidences (first alert: 2020-07-17)
The full history of changes to transient events listed within Astro-COLIBRI is available since 2024-07-01.

Data credits
- We use data products from the following sources:

Image credits
- We use images from the following sources:

Release history

The detailed history of our platform and the full release changelog is available here: Release History

A visual summary can be found on our YouTube channel:

General information

Definitions

Notifications

Smart-home integration

Legend of observatories and event types

Available archival data

Data credits

Image credits

Release history