The Zwicky Transient Facility: Science Objectives

By M. Graham, Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, E. Bellm, S. Adams, C. Barbarino, N. Blagorodnova, D. Bodewits, B. Bolin, Patrick R. Brady, S. Cenko and 107 more. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2019

581 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a public–private enterprise, is a new time-domain survey employing a dedicated camera on the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt telescope with a 47 deg2 field of view and an 8 second readout time. It is well positioned in the development of time-domain astronomy, offering operations at 10% of the scale and style of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) with a single 1-m class survey telescope. The public surveys will cover the observable northern sky every three nights in g and r filters and the visible Galactic plane every night in g and r. Alerts generated by these surveys are sent in real time to brokers. A consortium of universities that provided funding (“partnership”) are undertaking several boutique surveys. The combination of these surveys producing one million alerts per night allows for exploration of transient and variable astrophysical phenomena brighter than r ∼ 20.5 on timescales of minutes to years. We describe the primary science objectives driving ZTF, including the physics of supernovae and relativistic explosions, multi-messenger astrophysics, supernova cosmology, active galactic nuclei, and tidal disruption events, stellar variability, and solar system objects.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/442334f0515a00ac60bcffadf1b0998e645afa87

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Perley
2. S. Cenko
3. S. Gezari
4. R. Sanderson
5. T. Littenberg
6. S. Garrison-Kimmel
7. J. Sollerman
8. S. Dhawan

In Instrumentation

1. S. Gezari
2. S. Cenko
3. S. Garrison-Kimmel
4. J. Sollerman
5. S. Dhawan
6. R. Sanderson
7. Shrinivas R. Kulkarni
8. T. Kupfer

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. S. Garrison-Kimmel
2. J. Sollerman
3. S. Dhawan
4. R. Sanderson
5. Shrinivas R. Kulkarni
6. S. Gezari
7. S. Velzen

Citations in the corpus

• The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey (2022, background): “The first phase of the ZTF survey (hereafter ZTF-I; Bellm et al. 2019b; Graham et al. 2019) completed operations in 2020 October.”
• Predicting the LISA white dwarf binary population in the Milky Way with cosmological simulations (2019, background): “Large scale systematic searches for these high frequency systems are just starting, withe e.g. the high cadence survey ZTF (Zwicky Transient Factory; Bellm et al. 2019; Graham et al. 2019) and possibly LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope).”