Abstract
Fulfilling the rich promise of rapid advances in time-domain astronomy is only possible through confronting our observations with physical models and extracting the parameters that best describe what we see. Here, we introduce REDBACK; a Bayesian inference software package for electromagnetic transients. REDBACK provides an object-orientated PYTHON interface to over 12 different samplers and over 100 different models for kilonovae, supernovae, gamma-ray burst afterglows, tidal disruption events, engine-driven transients among other explosive transients. The models range in complexity from simple analytical and semi-analytical models to surrogates built upon numerical simulations accelerated via machine learning. REDBACK also provides a simple interface for downloading and processing data from various catalogues such as Swift and FINK. The software can also serve as an engine to simulate transients for telescopes such as the Zwicky Transient Facility and Vera Rubin with realistic cadences, limiting magnitudes, and sky coverage or a hypothetical user-constructed survey or a generic transient for target-of-opportunity observations with different telescopes. As a demonstration of its capabilities, we show how REDBACK can be used to jointly fit the spectrum and photometry of a kilonova, enabling a more powerful, holistic probe into the properties of a transient. We also showcase general examples of how REDBACK can be used as a tool to simulate transients for realistic surveys, fit models to real, simulated, or private data, multimessenger inference with gravitational waves, and serve as an end-to-end software toolkit for parameter estimation and interpreting the nature of electromagnetic transients.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1203-1227 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society |
| Volume | 531 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 13 May 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 30 Jun 2024 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Data Availability Statement
The software package along with example scripts for all analysis demonstrated in this manuscript alongside a plotting notebook to generate all the plots as well as other examples are available at https://github.com/nikhil-sarin/redback. The specific result objects for each of the analyses presented here are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8273145. REDBACK is available on PYPI. This paper uses v1.0 release of REDBACK with documentation at https://redback.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. The data for all transients is available at the OAC (Guillochon et al. 2017) gathered through the REDBACKget_data module or hosted at https://github.com/nikhil-sarin/redback.Funding
NS is supported by a Nordita Fellowship. Nordita is supported in part by NordForsk. SS and AS-C acknowledge support from the G.R.E.A.T. research environment, funded by Vetenskapsr\u00E5det, the Swedish Research Council, project no. 2016\u201306012. We thank Duncan Galloway, Phil Macias, Dougal Dobie, Karelle Siellez, Fiona Panther, Jacob Wise, Ariel Goobar, and Miti Patel for helpful comments on the software or manuscript. We are grateful to several members of the astronomical community for releasing their transient models as modular open-source software, many of these models form part of the available models in REDBACK. We hope the practice of releasing open-source software gathers more pace in transient astronomy. We also acknowledge the work done by numerous people to maintain public catalogues such as Swift Data Centre, OAC, FINK, and Lasair. NS is supported by a Nordita Fellowship. Nordita is supported in part by NordForsk. SS and AS-C acknowledge support from the G.R.E.A.T. research environment, funded by Vetenskapsr\u00E5det, the Swedish Research Council, project no. 2016\u201306012. A part of this work used computing facilities provided by the OzSTAR national facility at Swinburne University of Technology. The OzSTAR program receives funding in part from the Astronomy National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) allocation provided by the Australian Government. The REDBACK package makes use of the standard scientific PYTHON stack (Jones et al. 2001; McKinney 2010; Harris et al. 2020), MATPLOTLIB (Hunter 2007), and CORNER (Foreman-Mackey 2016), for the generation of figures, and ASTROPY (Robitaille et al. 2013; Price-Whelan et al. 2018; Astropy Collaboration 2022) for common astrophysics-specific operations. REDBACK makes use of BILBY (Ashton et al. 2019; Romero-Shaw et al. 2020) to provide an interface to different sampling algorithms and for evaluating prior distributions. REDBACK uses SNCOSMO (Barbary et al. 2022) for filter definitions and calculations of magnitude from SEDs, EXTINCTION (Barbary 2016) for extinction corrections. And REQUESTS and SELENIUM for downloading data from catalogues.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| NordForsk | |
| Vetenskapsrådet | 2016–06012 |
| Vetenskapsrådet | |
| Swinburne University of Technology | 2022, 2020 |
| Swinburne University of Technology |
Keywords
- black hole–neutron star mergers
- gamma-ray bursts
- neutron star mergers
- software: data analysis
- transients: supernovae
- transients: tidal disruption events
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Space and Planetary Science