FIRST RESULTS FROM THE CATALINA REAL-TIME TRANSIENT SURVEY

By A. Drake, S. Djorgovski, A. Mahabal, M. Graham, Roy Williams, M. Catelán, E. Beshore, S. Larson, E. Christensen. 2008

856 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report on the results from the first six months of the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS). In order to search for optical transients (OTs) with timescales of minutes to years, the CRTS analyses data from the Catalina Sky Survey which repeatedly covers 26,000 of square degrees on the sky. The CRTS provides a public stream of transients that are bright enough to be followed up using small telescopes. Since the beginning of the survey, all CRTS transients have been made available to astronomers around the world in real time using HTML tables,RSS feeds, and VOEvents. As part of our public outreach program, the detections are now also available in Keyhole Markup Language through Google Sky. The initial discoveries include over 350 unique OTs rising more than 2 mag from past measurements. Sixty two of these are classified as supernovae (SNe), based on light curves, prior deep imaging and spectroscopic data. Seventy seven are due to cataclysmic variables (CVs; only 13 previously known), while an additional 100 transients were too infrequently sampled to distinguish between faint CVs and SNe. The remaining OTs include active galactic nucleus, blazars, high-proper-motions stars, highly variable stars (such as UV Ceti stars), and transients of an unknown nature. Our results suggest that there is a large population of SNe missed by many current SN surveys because of selection biases. These objects appear to be associated with faint host galaxies. We also discuss the unexpected discovery of white dwarf binary systems through dramatic eclipses.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9afea3982a94232a5af994989009e74fd38b1307

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Citations in the corpus

On the diversity of superluminous supernovae: ejected mass as the dominant factor (2015, methodology): “However, in the era of expansive, untargeted sky surveys, E-mail : mnicholl03@qub.ac.uk such as the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Rau et al. 2009), PanSTARRS1 (PS1; Kaiser et al. 2010), the La Silla QUEST survey (LSQ; Baltay et al. 2013) and the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS; Drake et ”
SDSS unveils a population of intrinsically faint cataclysmic variables at the minimum orbital period (2009, methodology): “We do not include outburst information from robotic telescopes, e.g. the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (Drake et al. 2009), unless they were announced via one of the appropriate mailing lists.”
The WISE AGN Catalog (2017, methodology): “Additionally, we include its optical light curve from the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey13 (CRTS; Drake et al. 2009), retrieved from the Catalina Surveys Data Release 2.”
ATLAS: A High-cadence All-sky Survey System (2018, methodology): “The Catalina Real Time Survey (CRTS; Drake et al. 2009) is a very successful timedomain survey which has influenced survey science from the solar system through supernovae and AGN variability.”
RADIATIVE TRANSFER SIMULATIONS OF NEUTRON STAR MERGER EJECTA (2013, methodology): “…there are several projects using 1 m-class telescopes that can cover 4 deg2 area, such as the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Law et al. 2009; Rau et al. 2009), the La Silla-QUEST Variability Survey (Hadjiyska et al. 2012), and the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (Drake et al. 2009).”
SUPER-LUMINOUS TYPE Ic SUPERNOVAE: CATCHING A MAGNETAR BY THE TAIL (2013, background): “…al. 2009), the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS, Kaiser et al. 2010), the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey (CRTS, Drake et al. 2009), and the La Silla QUEST survey (Hadjiyska et al. 2012), all of which have found unusually luminous transients which tend to be…”
HYDROGEN-POOR SUPERLUMINOUS SUPERNOVAE AND LONG-DURATION GAMMA-RAY BURSTS HAVE SIMILAR HOST GALAXIES (2013, result): “In addition to the PS1/MDS SLSNe, we also include in our sample H-poor SLSNe reported by other surveys, most notably the PTF Law et al. 2009), the CRTS (Drake et al. 2009) and the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE-III; Akerlof et al. 2003).”
THE CARNEGIE SUPERNOVA PROJECT: LIGHT-CURVE FITTING WITH SNooPy (2010, result): “We also observed events from other surveys including the SDSS-II Supernova Survey (Frieman et al. 2008), the Catalina Sky Survey (Drake et al. 2009), the CHilean Automatic Supernova sEarch (Pignata et al. 2009, CHASE), as well as from many amateur observers3.”
PESSTO: survey description and products from the first data release by the Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey of Transient Objects (2014, background): “…actively searching for transients are the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Law et al. 2009), the Pan-STARRS1 survey (PS1; Kaiser et al. 2010), the Catalina Real Time Survey (CRTS; Drake et al. 2009), the La Silla QUEST survey (LSQ; Baltay et al. 2013), and the SkyMapper survey (Keller et al. 2007).”
Spectroscopy of superluminous supernova host galaxies. A preference of hydrogen-poor events for extreme emission line galaxies (2014, background): “During the last decade, modern transient surveys (e.g. Quimby et al. 2005; Drake et al. 2009; Law et al. 2009; Tonry et al. 2012), which do not target specific galaxies, contributed to the discovery of new classes of transients.”
A Population of Short-Period Variable Quasars from PTF as Supermassive Black Hole Binary Candidates (2016, methodology): “…of SMBHBs through line diagnosis is challenging. c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 with data from the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS; Drake et al. 2009; Mahabal et al. 2011; Djorgovski et al. 2012), an all-sky, time domain survey, in unfiltered visible light, calibrated to Jonhson…”
New white dwarf and subdwarf stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 12 (2015, methodology): “08+290828.7 to a cataclysmic variable (CV), with a period around 0.1 d based on data from the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS, Drake et al. 2009).”
Post common envelope binaries from SDSS - XI. The white dwarf mass distributions of CVs and pre-CVs (2011, neutral): “…al. (1998), (4) Parsons et al. (2010), (5) Tappert et al. (2007), (6) Schmidt et al. (1995), (7) Orosz et al. (1999), (8) Saffer et al. (1993), (9) Drake et al. (2009), (10) Pyrzas et al. (2009), (11) Maxted et al. (2007), (12) Kawka et al. (2000), (13) Bragaglia et al. (1995), (14) Koester et…”
Post-common-envelope binaries from SDSS. IX: Constraining the common-envelope efficiency (2010, methodology): “Based on Table A1 in NT05, Table 1 in Schreiber & Gänsicke (2003) and with some additional recent identifications from Burleigh et al. (2006); Tappert et al. (2007); Drake et al. (2009); Tappert et al. (2009) we compiled a list of PCEBs that were not identified with our SDSS PCEB survey.”
The SED Machine: A Robotic Spectrograph for Fast Transient Classification (2017, background): “discovery rate is expected to increase in the future as soon as new surveys such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and the Large Synoptic Sky Survey (LSST) come on line.”
Rates of superluminous supernovae at z ∼ 0.2 (2013, background): “Any such distinction may be borne out by the larger samples of normal supernovae and SLSNe currently being gathered by searches such as PTF, Pan-STARRS, the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (Drake et al. 2009), and La Silla-QUEST (Hadjiyska et al. 2012).”