The Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network
The Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network (AMON) is a program currently under development at The Pennsylvania State University, in collaboration with a growing list of U.S. and international observatories. AMON seeks to perform a real-time correlation analysis of the high-energy signals across all known astronomical messengers – photons, neutrinos, cosmic rays, and gravitational waves – in an effort to: 1) Enhance the combined sensitivity of collaborating observatories to astrophysical transients by searching for coincidences in their sub-threshold data; and 2) Enable rapid follow-up imaging or archival analysis of the putative astrophysical sources. AMON participants can be characterized as “triggering,” “follow-up,” or both. Triggering participants are generally observatories that monitor a large portion of the sky and feed a stream of sub-threshold events into the AMON system. These events are processed to search for temporal and spatial correlations, leading to secondary “AMON alerts.” Follow-up participants generally search for electromagnetic counterparts to the AMON alerts with high-throughput, narrower field-of-view telescopes.
