Live Cosmic Context Engine

Purpose

The Cosmic Context Engine (CCE-01) surfaces the single most scientifically significant event detectable in live open-access data feeds and explains it at three selectable depths. The goal is to give any visitor — regardless of scientific background — an honest, accurate, and engaging account of what the universe is doing right now.

Data Sources

• NASA DONKI (donki.gsfc.nasa.gov) — Space Weather Database of Notifications, Knowledge, Information. Provides solar flare events (class, peak time, source region), coronal mass ejections with Earth-directed flag, geomagnetic storm reports, and solar energetic particle events. API is public, no authentication required for the FLR and CME endpoints used here.
• JPL NeoWs (api.nasa.gov) — Near Earth Object Web Service. Provides close approach data for all catalogued NEOs within a 7-day window including absolute magnitude, estimated diameter, miss distance, and relative velocity. Requires a free NASA API key; this module uses the public demo key subject to rate limits.
• NOAA SWPC (services.swpc.noaa.gov) — Space Weather Prediction Center. Provides the planetary K-index (Kp) updated every 3 hours from ground-based magnetometer networks, solar wind speed and density from DSCOVR/ACE at L1 (updated ~1 minute), and active alert/warning/watch notices.
• GraceDB (gracedb.ligo.org) — Gravitational Wave Candidate Event Database operated by LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Provides public superevent alerts for binary black hole, binary neutron star, and neutron star-black hole merger candidates. Public REST API, no authentication.

Significance Scoring Model

Each event receives a raw score S computed from domain-specific parameters, then normalised to 0-100 for display. Higher scores indicate greater scientific significance by the criteria below. The top-scoring event across all sources is displayed as the primary event.

Recency decay: all scores are multiplied by exp(-age_hours / 48) so that a 48-hour-old event retains ~37% of its score. Events older than 7 days are excluded entirely.

Depth Levels

• Surface — One or two sentences. No jargon. Aimed at someone who has never read a science article. All specific values (distances, speeds, magnitudes) are translated into human-scale comparisons.
• Context — A paragraph explaining the physical mechanism, the broader significance, and why scientists care. Introduces technical vocabulary once, in plain terms, before using it. Includes a Fun Fact drawn directly from the event parameters.
• Deep — Full scientific account. Quantitative parameters, physical equations described in words, measurement methodology, uncertainty bounds where available, and the provenance of every number. Aimed at an undergraduate or technically literate adult.

Limitations and Honest Caveats

• DONKI and NOAA endpoints occasionally return stale data during server maintenance. The data-age timestamp on each event reflects the event time, not the fetch time.
• GraceDB public alerts represent candidates, not confirmed detections. Significance is assigned at the candidate stage; retractions are possible and will update on the next refresh.
• NeoWs uses the NASA demo API key which is rate-limited to 30 requests/hour across all users. On high-traffic periods the fetch may return a cached or null result.
• The significance scoring model is Astrophyzix original methodology. It is designed to surface scientifically interesting events, not to replicate any official alert classification system.
• No AI, no generative language model, and no probabilistic text generation is used anywhere in this module. Every word of explanation is produced by deterministic templates keyed to real data values.