We can not choose the timing of events in the universe. That’s why we built Rubin Observatory after all. As we move through the next phase of the observatory, early operations, we are trying to balance our highest priority, getting to the start of LSST, with opportunities nature is throwing at us. Last week we received notice that an exciting LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) gravitational wave event had occurred: S251112cm. As it happens, we were literally in the midst of further standing up of our TOO process at Rubin. Following the successful commissioning of TOO ingestion infrastructure at the observatory, we had just convened the TOO Advisory Board which resulted from a recommendation from the community based workshop held in 2024 at Berkeley. We will post the membership of this community based group on rubinobservatory.org as soon as possible.
I took the decision to allow our team to obtain observations in the footprint of 251112cm. This has resulted in the following GCN Circular. A number of you have reached out to ask about accessing the data Rubin has obtained. This is where the balance comes in. Processing the data and preparing it for access at the US DAC is not trivial. Even a few nights of data from Rubin is a significant undertaking to fully process and document/validate for broad use and then support. This would have real impact on our ability to move ahead with DP2 and continue our optimization of Rubin in preparation for starting LSST. So we are working with a small team of Rubin folks including some in-kind contributors who have prior access and robust knowledge of our system to analyze the data and look for counterparts.
Our intent is to take data that (with low likelihood) might yield a counterpart to a new class of merger. If we do identify any candidates the Rubin team thinks are significant we will share them publicly with everyone with no prior advantage to any group. So far, the team has only been able to say something about other candidates (see the GCN circular); we have not seen anything new to add from the Rubin images. We have more data to analyze and will post soon if something turns up.
These images will likely not be included in DP2 except in the case they fall in a DDF (a few do). For full disclosure, a small number of alerts generated for broker commissioning in the error region of the event have been sent to brokers intentionally so they could help us look at various sources. These have also not generated anything new, and would again result in a coordinated announcement to all if they do.
I know this is an imperfect process. We are doing our best to do what we can in this case while we are not fully prepared for TOOs. And to be clear, this is not the beginning of the regular alert production. We are working toward that with the broker teams so that everyone is ready when the alert production is fully qualified by the Rubin DM team.
I will update you all on where we are later in December and before the year end holidays. In the mean time, you can follow our weekly progress here with the updates from Keith Bechtol.