About this site
How it works, where the data comes from, and who made it.
What is LSST?
The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is a ten-year optical survey of the southern sky conducted by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. Beginning science operations in 2025, LSST captures the entire visible southern sky every few nights with a 3.2-gigapixel camera — generating roughly 10 million transient alerts every night. Each alert represents a source that changed in brightness or position since the previous observation.
The scale of this dataset is hard to overstate. In a single night, Rubin will detect more transient events than all previous optical surveys combined. Most alerts are familiar phenomena — variable stars, known asteroids, supernovae following predictable light curves. But a small fraction behave in ways that don't fit any known template. Those are the ones this site is looking for.
What is ANTARES?
ANTARES (Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System) is an alert broker developed by NOIRLab that ingests the raw Rubin and ZTF alert streams and adds contextual annotations. For each event, ANTARES computes derived properties, applies machine learning classifiers, cross-matches against known catalogs, and tags objects with labels that reflect their behavior — things like nuclear_transient, dwarf_nova_outburst, or LAISS_RFC_AD_filter (flagged as anomalous by a trained neural network).
ANTARES also produces a per-locus anomaly score (0–1) that reflects how unusual an object's light curve is compared to the broader variable-star population. This site queries the ANTARES public search API daily, pulling the most recently updated LSST loci and running them through a local scoring filter.
Methodology
Each locus retrieved from ANTARES is assigned an interest score from 0 to 100 based on a combination of its tags, the ANTARES anomaly score, and its photometric properties. The top six from each daily poll are surfaced here.
| Signal | Points | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 tag | +25 each | Rare, specific labels: tidal disruption events, ML anomaly flags, super-luminous supernova candidates, dwarf nova outbursts, and similar high-value signals |
| Tier 2 tag | +10 each | Broader labels — nuclear transients, extragalactic sources, fading events — that are interesting when combined with other signals |
| ANTARES score | up to +40 | The ANTARES 0–1 anomaly score scaled to 40 points |
| Outlier classification | +20 | ANTARES has classified this object as an outlier — its light curve does not match known variable star classes |
| Amplitude > 2.0 mag | +25 | Dramatic peak-to-peak brightness change in the r-band |
| Amplitude 1.5–2.0 mag | +15 | |
| Amplitude 1.0–1.5 mag | +5 | |
| Known boring type | −40 | RR Lyrae, Cepheids, eclipsing binaries, and standard AGN are deprioritized — they are well-understood and common |
Only objects scoring at or above 40 are saved. The daily snapshot always shows the six highest-scoring objects discovered in the past 24 hours. If no new objects qualify on a given day, the previous snapshot is retained.