The automation of optical transient discovery and classification in Rubin-era time-domain astronomy

We thank E. C. Bellm and Y. (Vic) Dong for their thoughtful comments. The ideas presented here have been improved through discussions at the Astroinformatics 2024 conference in Patagonia, Chile, and the 2025 Foundation Models for Astronomy Workshop at the Center for Computational Astrophysics of the Flatiron Institute. We thank the respective organizers and sponsors for providing rich discussion environments. Zwicky Transient Facility access for N.R. and A.A.M. was supported by Northwestern University and the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). A.A.M. is supported by DoE award no. DE-SC0025599. A.A.M. is also supported by Cottrell Scholar award no. CS-CSA-2025-059 from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. N.R. is supported by NSF award no. 2421845 and a Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship award. M.W.C. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation under grant nos. PHY-2308862 and PHY-2117997. Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48-inch and the 60-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant nos. AST-1440341 and AST-2034437 and currently award no. 2407588. ZTF receives additional funding from the ZTF partnership. Current members include Caltech, USA; Caltech/IPAC, USA; University of Maryland, USA; University of California, Berkeley, USA; University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, USA; Cornell University, USA; Drexel University, USA; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA; Institute of Science and Technology, Austria; National Central University, Taiwan, and OKC, University of Stockholm, Sweden. Operations are conducted by Caltech’s Optical Observatory (COO), Caltech/IPAC and the University of Washington at Seattle, USA. SED Machine is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 1106171. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, through both the Data-Driven Investigator Program and a dedicated grant, provided critical funding for SkyPortal. This research has made use of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System.