Astro-COLIBRI—The COincidence LIBrary for Real-time Inquiry for Multimessenger Astrophysics

Abstract

Astro-COLIBRI is a novel tool that evaluates alerts of transient observations in real time, filters them by user-specified criteria, and puts them into their multiwavelength and multimessenger context. Through fast generation of an overview of persistent sources as well as transient events in the relevant phase space, Astro-COLIBRI contributes to an enhanced discovery potential of both serendipitous and follow-up observations of the transient sky. The software’s architecture comprises a Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface, both a static and a real-time database, a cloud-based alert system, as well as a website and apps for iOS and Android as clients for users. The latter provide a graphical representation with a summary of the relevant data to allow for the fast identification of interesting phenomena along with an assessment of observing conditions at a large selection of observatories around the world.