IceCube neutrino alert maps in Lasair

Support Lasair
#1

IceCube now provides skymaps of their high-energy neutrino alerts in a similar format to GW skymaps in their GCN Notices Kafka stream (see the schema here: GCN - Documentation - Schema Browser - v6.1.1 - gcn/notices/icecube/single_neutrino_alerts).

Would it be possible to automatically ingest these skymaps as well?

#2

In principle yes. We can do GW skymaps so these are similar. Problems:

  • I personally do not know enough about the science, especially timescales, to justify prioritising this.
  • IceCube detections are northern hemisphere (passed through the Earth) but Rubin is southern hemisphere
#3

Thanks for the reply, Roy! IceCube indeed is observing mostly the northern sky but is actually most sensitive around the equator. You can see the distribution of the IceCube alerts in the attached image from this conference contribution.

Bildschirmfoto 2026-03-11 um 17.31.38
Bildschirmfoto 2026-03-11 um 17.31.381492×740 143 KB

Rubin will also actively follow-up the IceCube alerts (see e.g. this community note) so there there will be interest in filtering for candidate counterparts for these observations.