NEural Engine for Discovering Luminous Events (NEEDLE) Classifier Updates and Discoveries

This presentation includes NEural Engine for Discovering Luminous Events (NEEDLE) Classifier explanation, discoveries and updates. NEEDLE (Sheng et al. 2024) is a machine-learning tool for identifying rare astronomical transients from real-time alerts. NEEDLE is trained to identify Superluminous Supernova (SLSN) and Tidal Disruption Events (TDE) candidates in data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF; Bellm et al. 2019; Graham et al. 2019). NEEDLE is running daily on public ZTF alerts, streamed via the Lasair alert broker (Williams et al. 2024), and publicly providing classification predictions as annotations on Lasair.