DETECT: Real-Time Identification of Transients with DESI Spectroscopic Redshift

Abstract

Wide-field surveys now report thousands of transients per month, while spectra are obtained for only a few per cent of them. We present DETECT (DESI--Transient Event Cross-matching Tool), a pipeline that turns each Transient Name Server (TNS) alert into a distance-informed candidate within an hour by placing it in the context of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) archive. DETECT cross-matches every new report against the 22 million spectra of DESI EDR and DR1 through a HEALPix index, associates the transient with a host galaxy by a directional-light-radius rule whose morphology-dependent thresholds are calibrated on 4,474 supernovae with known redshifts (92.5% completeness, 0.4% wrong hosts), and passes ambiguous cases to a reviewer through a web interface. With a validated host redshift it derives the peak absolute magnitude, the projected offset and basic host properties of each event, and ranks it for spectroscopic follow-up. Applied retrospectively to ~1.2x10^5 TNS reports from 2020--2024, DETECT recovers a spectroscopic host for 15% of them, from these we build a Gold Sample of ~5,400 well-sampled light curves whose luminosity distributions by class reproduce those of untargeted surveys. Because the absolute magnitude is known at discovery, intrinsically overluminous events stand out immediately: in the prospective 2025 run this is how the lensed superluminous supernova SN~2025wny was flagged within hours of its report, and how faint, fast-declining kilonova candidates were screened against model grids and archival photometry. DETECT shows how an archival spectroscopic survey can make host redshifts a routine part of transient triage ahead of the Rubin Observatory's LSST.