Towards An Integrated Optical Transient Utility

Understand

The ongoing optical time-domain astronomy surveys are routinely reporting fifty transient candidates per night.

• Here, I investigate the demographics of astronomical transients and supernova classifications reported to the Transient Name Server in the year 2019.
• I find that only a tenth of the transients were spectrally classified.
• This severe "bottleneck" problem should concern astronomers and also funding agencies.