Transient astronomy in the Vera Rubin Era

I am an observational astronomer searching for new transients in the night sky.

With our wide-field camera and a combination of robotic telescopes and machine-learning data analysis, we have transformed time-domain astronomy. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) - where I am a lead scientist - paved the way.

We now find exploding stars - supernovae - and other optical transients - not weeks after explosion, but on the very night of the outbreak. This is a probe of the final years in the life of a massive star. The past years we have invested and prepared. We have demonstrated our ability to find, follow, analyse and publish on many kinds of transients.

Now the next steps are ahead: The Vera Rubin Observatory and the Legacy Survey for Space and Time (LSST)  is coming online in 2025, and we have become partners in this large enterprise.

It will issue 10 million transient alerts every night for 10-years.We will improve our understanding of supernova explosions by enlarged statistics and more rapid discoveries. The path forward is quite clear given our success with the ZTF project.

Moreover, the era of multi-messenger astronomy - hunting for counterparts of gravitational wave triggers and extragalactic neutrino detections - has just begun. We are well prepared.