The Zwicky Transient Facility: System Overview, Performance, and First Results

By E. Bellm, Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, M. Graham, R. Dekany, Roger M. Smith, R. Riddle, F. Masci, G. Helou, T. Prince, S. Adams and 105 more. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2018

1,331 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is a new optical time-domain survey that uses the Palomar 48 inch Schmidt telescope. A custom-built wide-field camera provides a 47 deg2 field of view and 8 s readout time, yielding more than an order of magnitude improvement in survey speed relative to its predecessor survey, the Palomar Transient Factory. We describe the design and implementation of the camera and observing system. The ZTF data system at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center provides near-real-time reduction to identify moving and varying objects. We outline the analysis pipelines, data products, and associated archive. Finally, we present on-sky performance analysis and first scientific results from commissioning and the early survey. ZTF’s public alert stream will serve as a useful precursor for that of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6ac9310aefd382b25eeb3d7ea82ba824e64482aa

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Citations in the corpus

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).”
The Zwicky Transient Facility: Data Processing, Products, and Archive (2018, background): “Technical specifications of the observing system (OS), its performance, survey design, and early science results are described in Bellm et al. (2019).”
IceCube-Gen2: the window to the extreme Universe (2020, methodology): “Second, a catalog of optically detected SNe and TDEs, from instruments such as the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) and the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) [171, 172], can be used to search for the combined neutrino signal from the entire source populations.”