SCOTCH: 5 Million Simulated Transients and Host Galaxies for LSST

SCOTCH is a static catalogue containing 5 million simulated explosive transients and the properties of their realistically-associated host galaxies. It includes 13 transient classes, such as supernovae and non-supernovae events, with data on light curves and host galaxy properties. The dataset was created by Martine Lokken et al. at the University of Toronto, with methodology detailed in a 2022 paper.

Use Cases

• Training classification models for transient events based on simulated light curves in LSST passbands.
• Studying correlations between transient properties and host galaxy features like stellar mass and star-formation rate.
• Preparing analysis pipelines for the Vera Rubin Observatory by querying the simulated catalogue for specific science cases.
• Investigating low-redshift events like kilonovae using the scotch_zlim.hdf5 catalogue subset.

Strengths

• Contains 5 million simulated transient and host galaxy pairs, providing a large-scale testbed.
• Covers 13 distinct transient classes, including supernova and non-supernova types.
• Includes realistic host galaxy properties such as apparent magnitude, shape, star-formation rate, and stellar mass.
• Provides true, top-of-the-galaxy light curves in Vera Rubin Observatory LSST passbands (ugrizY).

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• The relative rates between transient classes in the scotch_z3.hdf5 file are described as not realistic.

Provenance

Source

University of Toronto, created by Martine Lokken and collaborators.

Collection Method

Simulated using methodologies from Lokken, Gagliano et al. (2022), with host galaxies from CosmoDC2 and transients simulated in SNANA.