Using the VO to Study the Time Domain

Abstract

Just as the astronomical "Time Domain" is a catch-phrase for a diverse group of different science objectives involving time-varying phenomena in all astrophysical regimes from the solar system to cosmological scales, so the "Virtual Observatory" is a complex set of community-wide activities from archives to astroinformatics. This workshop touched on some aspects of adapting and developing those semantic and network technologies in order to address transient and time-domain research challenges. It discussed the VOEvent format for representing alerts and reports on celestial transient events, the SkyAlert and ATELstream facilities for distributing these alerts, and the IVOA time-series protocol and time-series tools provided by the VAO. Those tools and infrastructure are available today to address the real-world needs of astronomers.

Contribution to the proceedings of IAU Symposium 285, "New Horizons in Time Domain Astronomy": http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/IAUS285/, 6 pages