About us | ALeRCE

Alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides) is a tall, long-lived conifer native to southern Chile and Argentina. They are also known as lahuán (lawal in mapudungún), or Patagonian cypress. They can live up to 4000 yr and reach up to 60 m of height. Credit: Nick Hall photography

The Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events (ALeRCE) project

The ALeRCE broker is a Chilean-led broker which is processing the alert stream from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and which aims to become a Community Broker for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), as well as other large etendue survey telescopes. We are using Cloud Infrastructure and Machine Learning models to bring real-time processed products and services to the astronomical community.

ALeRCE is funded by the Millennium Institute for Astrophysics – MAS, the Center for Mathematical Modeling - CMM at Universidad de Chile, and since 2020 the Data Observatory, in collaboration with researchers from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez - UAI, Universidad Austral de Chile - UACH (Informatics), Universidad Católica de Chile - UC (Astronomy), Universidad de Chile - UCH (Astronomy - DAS, Electrical Engineering - DIE), Universidad de Concepción - UdeC (Informatics), Universidad Nacional Andres Bello – UNAB (Astronomy), Universidad de Santiago de Chile - USACH (Statistics), Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana - UTEM (Computer Science), Universidad de Valparaíso - UV (Astronomy), and REUNA in Chile, and international researchers from Caltech and Harvard U. and U. of Washington.

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ALeRCE users

The geographic distribution of users of the ALeRCE Explorer according to Google Analytics, which is estimated counting the unique combinations of device & browser accessing our website. In total, we have more than 6,739 estimated users coming from 125 different countries accessing the ALeRCE Explorer.