Exploring the Optical Transient Sky with the Palomar Transient Factory

By A. Rau, Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, N. M. Law, Joshua S. Bloom, D. Ciardi, G. Djorgovski, D. Fox, A. Gal-yam, C. Grillmair, Mansi M. Kasliwal and 14 more. 2009

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The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a wide-field experiment designed to investigate the optical transient and variable sky on time scales from minutes to years. PTF uses the CFH12k mosaic camera, with a field of view of 7.9 deg2 and a plate scale of 1″ pixel-1, mounted on the Palomar Observatory 48 inch Samuel Oschin Telescope. The PTF operation strategy is devised to probe the existing gaps in the transient phase space and to search for theoretically predicted, but not yet detected, phenomena, such as fallback supernovae, macronovae,. Ia supernovae, and the orphan afterglows of gamma-ray bursts. PTF will also discover many new members of known source classes, from cataclysmic variables in their various avatars to supernovae and active galactic nuclei, and will provide important insights into understanding galactic dynamics (through RR Lyrae stars) and the solar system (asteroids and near-Earth objects). The lessons that can be learned from PTF will be essential for the preparation of future large synoptic sky surveys like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. In this article we present the scientific motivation for PTF and describe in detail the goals and expectations for this experiment.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d9e38f50a4509d472c7ea314cbfac040dc44db05

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Citations in the corpus

Delay-time distribution of core-collapse supernovae with late events resulting from binary interaction (2017, background): “Examples are the Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS, Filippenko et al. 2001), the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF, Rau et al. 2009; Law et al. 2009), and its near-future upgrade, the Zwicky Transient Facility, the All-Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN, Shappee et al. 2014),…”
CALCIUM-RICH GAP TRANSIENTS IN THE REMOTE OUTSKIRTS OF GALAXIES (2011, background): “The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Law et al. 2009; Rau et al. 2009)16 is a wide-angle transient survey that has an ongoing Dynamic Cadence experiment that combines the advantages of both a targeted and an untargeted survey.”
Optical Flares from the Tidal Disruption of Stars by Massive Black Holes (2009, background): “However, we are entering a new era of transient surveys: in the optical, surveys like Pan-STARRS (PS1, then all four telescopes) (e.g., Magnier 2007), the Palomar Transient Factory (Rau et al. 2009), and later the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will have fast cadence, wide fields of view, and unpre”
ULTRA-BRIGHT OPTICAL TRANSIENTS ARE LINKED WITH TYPE Ic SUPERNOVAE (2010, background): “On the following day Quimby et al. (2010b) reported the independent discovery by the PTF survey (Rau et al. 2009; Law et al. 2009) of the same variable source (labeled as PTF10cwr) at several epochs between March 5 and 16, whilst no object was seen on March 4.27 UT to a limiting magnitude of 20.4.”
Rates of superluminous supernovae at z ∼ 0.2 (2013, background): “Later discoveries by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Law et al. 2009; Rau et al. 2009) and Pan-STARRS (Kaiser et al. 2010) of similar objects show that this class of objects is depleted in hydrogen and thus cannot produce its luminosity through interactions with a hydrogen rich CSM (Pastorello…”
A Population of Short-Period Variable Quasars from PTF as Supermassive Black Hole Binary Candidates (2016, background): “The scientific goals and the technical aspects of the PTF project are detailed in Rau et al. (2009) and Law et al. (2009).”
SUPER-LUMINOUS TYPE Ic SUPERNOVAE: CATCHING A MAGNETAR BY THE TAIL (2013, methodology): “This has been followed by deeper, wider surveys from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF, Rau et 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…”
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).”
PROPER IMAGE SUBTRACTION—OPTIMAL TRANSIENT DETECTION, PHOTOMETRY, AND HYPOTHESIS TESTING (2016, methodology): “Tests on real images We tested the new method on imaging data available from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF17; Law et al. 2009; Rau et al. 2009) data release 2.”
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Fourteenth data release (2017, methodology): “…sources of imaging data have been used to target quasars in SDSS-IV/eBOSS (full details can be found in Myers et al. 2015): updated calibrations of SDSS imaging, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey (WISE; Wright et al. 2010), and the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Rau et al. 2009; Law et al. 2009).”
A systematic search for close supermassive black hole binaries in the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey (2015, background): “…holes at small separations (∼ 0.01 pc) is ∼10 years and there are now a number of synoptic sky surveys with sufficient temporal baselines and sky coverage for a large scale search for such objects based on their photometry (Pojmanski 2002; Udalski et al. 1993; Rau et al. 2009; Sesar et al. 2011).”
THE BLACK HOLE MASS DISTRIBUTION IN THE GALAXY (2010, background): “Similarly, supernova and transient surveys (e.g., Rau et al. 2009, and references therein) provide increasingly larger data samples that have revealed a range of supernova properties and energetics that is wider than previously anticipated.”
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Sixteenth Data Release (2020, methodology): “Finally, information on source variability from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Law et al. 2009; Rau et al. 2009) was used to supplement quasar targeting (Palanque-Delabrouille et al. 2016).”
TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE STRONGLY INTERACTING WITH THEIR CIRCUMSTELLAR MEDIUM (2013, methodology): “This object was discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Rau et al. 2009; Law et al. 2009) and shown to initially resemble the somewhat overluminous Type Ia SN 1999aa (Li et al. 2001; Strolger et al. 2002; Garavini et al. 2004).”
THE SDSS-IV EXTENDED BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: OVERVIEW AND EARLY DATA (2015, methodology): “In eBOSS, we will use the same technique applied to multi-epoch imaging data from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Rau et al. 2009; Law et al. 2009).”
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Twelfth data release (2016, methodology): “– PTF sample: quasars over a wide range of redshifts are selected via their photometric variability measured from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Rau et al. 2009; Law et al. 2009).”
HATSouth: A Global Network of Fully Automated Identical Wide-Field Telescopes (2012, methodology): “…Survey (ASAS; Pojmanski 2002) employing a 0.1m telescope to scan the entire sky and discover ∼ 50000 new variables; the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Rau et al. 2009) exploring the optical transient sky, finding on average one transient every 20 minutes, and discovering ∼ 1500 supernovae so…”
COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS FROM MEASUREMENTS OF TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE DISCOVERED DURING THE FIRST 1.5 yr OF THE Pan-STARRS1 SURVEY (2013, background): “There are significant efforts underway to improve and homogenize the photometric calibration of previous (e.g., SNLS and SDSS, Betoule et al. 2012) and on-going widefield transient surveys like PS1 (Kaiser et al. 2010), PTF (Rau et al. 2009), and the Dark Energy Survey (DES, Flaugher et al. 2012).”