Delivering Open, Accessible and Collaborative Infrastructure Enabling Multi-Messenger Astrophysics

Astrophysical sources are now being studied by simultaneously combining information from multiple messengers - gravitational waves, neutrinos and light. Each of these messengers are undergoing improvements in sensitivity by hardware upgrades. Hand-in-hand with hardware progress, urgent software progress is needed. The investigators will develop open-source and accessible software to deliver three major missing software needs. The program includes a real-time Zooniverse for classrooms that leverages longitudinal timezone differences to allow citizen scientists to tune into the excitement of real-time multi-messenger discovery, collaborations with the amateur astronomer community to further their contributions to multi-messenger discoveries, and the organization of a summer internship program for undergraduate and graduate students that is cross-institutional. A 3-year proposal led by the California Institute of Technology spans the breadth of multi-messenger astrophysics, including electromagnetic counterparts to both gravitational wave sources and high energy neutrinos. The investigators propose to deliver three open and accessible software infrastructure projects that will boost discoveries for the entire multi-messenger community. First, enabling joint querying of heterogeneous discovery streams in real-time. This will boost both timely selection of the most viable multi-messenger candidates as well as timely rejection of the false positives. Second, facilitating active follow-up co-ordination between independent teams using a decentralized communications framework. This will enable optimal use of follow-up resources that are already the bottleneck in multi-messenger searches. Third, improving software for public low-latency gravitational wave alerts using inclination-based inference to refine electromagnetic counterpart search strategies. Together, these three software infrastructure pillars will amplify the power of collaborative discovery. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.