Speaker
Description
Almost all astronomical transients are hosted by a galaxy. Hostless transients are rare and have been associated with events that probe the extremes of physical mechanisms. Early identification based on their hostless characteristics would allow rapid follow-up and consequently better datasets for modelling and interpretation. Most apparently hostless events are not in fact hostless but their hosts are fainter than the limiting magnitude of the discovery survey. Thus, detecting hostless events could also be used as an indirect mechanism to discover low surface brightness galaxies. Only a few true hostless events have been found to date resulting in an illustrative application for automatic anomaly detection techniques. We developed a pipeline that implements fairly simple anomaly detection methods built upon the experience of domain knowledge experts. We aim to detect possible hostless transients using large surveys' alerts. We plan on implementing this pipeline into the FINK broker to provide hostless candidates in real-time. In this talk, I will describe the science case and highlight features that should be considered when dealing with real astronomical alerts. I will also show examples of a few hostless candidates and discuss how they can be used as templates to search for similar sources.
