Orateur
Description
Within minutes of a neutron-star merger, a gravitational-wave trigger, a gamma-ray burst, and an optical kilonova surface in separate data streams — and the discovery exists only if those streams can be joined fast enough to point telescopes before the source fades. SCIMMA, the Scalable Cyberinfrastructure for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics, builds and operates that connective layer; its Kafka-based Hopskotch platform already distributes LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA alerts to follow-up teams worldwide. The scale is about to grow by orders of magnitude. The Schmidt Sciences Observatory System alone brings three facilities online this decade: the all-sky Argus Array on second cadences, the Deep Synoptic Array localizing thousands of fast radio bursts per year, and the Lazuli space telescope responding to targets of opportunity in under four hours. These arrive alongside Rubin's ten million alerts per night, the gravitational-wave and neutrino networks, Euclid's deep imaging, and the Sino-French SVOM's real-time gamma-ray burst triggers. None is useful in isolation; the physics lives in the coincidences between them. I will describe SCIMMA as an end-to-end stack: Hopskotch routes the alerts, HERMES gives people and machines access to the streams, DASH classifies supernova spectra in real time, BLAST characterizes host galaxies, and HEROIC coordinates follow-up across facilities. With the AI methods of the NSF-Simons SkAI Institute and platforms such as Astro-COLIBRI, these tools turn heterogeneous streams into discoveries within seconds. The telescopes of the next decade are being built now; the infrastructure that lets them act as on observatory has to be built alongside them.