2025 OzFink workshop: Seconds to Discovery - Rubin's Alert Era Begins
This workshop is timed in the dawn of a transformative moment in astrophysics: the first alerts from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Rubin will soon begin the most ambitious optical survey ever undertaken, expected to detect up to 10 million time-domain events per night over the next decade.
The workshop will strengthen connections across different fields of time-domain astronomy in Australia and provide hands-on experience with Fink, a public alert broker that will distribute and process Rubin data in real-time. Participants will explore the publicly available Rubin LSST through Fink (simulations, precursors, and real data, if available) and build practical expertise for the next decade of scientific discoveries.
Program: The meeting will happen in Swinburne University between November 10 and 12, 2025 and it is supported by the ARC CoE OzGrav and CNRS/IN2P3.
The program will include contributed talks on early science, tutorials on accessing and filtering Rubin alerts, and collaborative sessions to develop custom detection algorithms for variable and transient phenomena. Topics include:
Maximising science with alerts.
Accessing and analyzing Rubin public time-domain data via Fink
Using Fink's filtering and ranking tools for targeted science goals
Integrating Rubin data with multi-messenger and multi-wavelength observations and facilities.
Developing custom filters to identify promising follow-up candidates