The Open mulTiwavelength Transient Event Repository (OTTER): Infrastructure Release and Tidal Disruption Event Catalog

Abstract Multiwavelength analyses of astrophysical transients are essential for understanding the physics of these events. To make such analyses more efficient and effective, we present the Open mulTiwavelength Transient Event Repository (OTTER), a publicly available catalog of published transient event metadata and photometry. Unlike previous efforts, our data schema is optimized for the storage of multiwavelength photometric datasets spanning the entire electromagnetic spectrum from multiple published sources. Open-source software, including an application programming interface (API) and web application, are available for viewing, accessing, and analyzing the dataset. For the initial release of OTTER, we present the largest ever photometric archive of tidal disruption event (TDE) candidates, including ≳118,000 observations of 240 TDE candidates spanning from radio to X-ray wavelengths. We demonstrate the power of this infrastructure through four example analyses of the TDE population. We plan to maintain this dataset as more TDE candidates are proposed in the future and encourage other users to contribute by uploading newly published data via our web application. The infrastructure was built with the goal of archiving additional transient data (supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, fast blue optical transients, fast radio bursts, etc.) in the future. The web application is available at https://otter.idies.jhu.edu and the API documentation is available at https://astro-otter.readthedocs.io .