SNEWS Protocols

Coincidence Requirement

Upon observing a potential pre-supernova phenomena, the detector generates an observation message and publish it. The SNEWS 2.0 server reads in the message and run the coincidence requirement check defined by SNEWS astronomers. The first version of the protocol compares the time and locations of observations among unexpired messages. The simplified version of the algorithm is

If there're multiple messages within the last 24 hours:
    Then iterates through messages to check if any two or more are within 10s
        If yes:
            verify locations different (as long as at least two are in different locations)
                If the locations are different:
                    return true
                Otherwise:
                    return false
            If not, no-op or print a message
        if no:
            no-op

In future releases, the coincidence requirement protocol will likely include triangulations to identify coordinates of the possible supernova.