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 deg^2 and a plate scale of 1 asec/pixel, mounted on the 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 paper we present the scientific motivation for PTF and describe in detail the goals and expectations for this experiment.
@article{arxiv.0906.5355,
title = {Exploring the Optical Transient Sky with the Palomar Transient Factory},
author = {Arne Rau and Shrinivas R. Kulkarni and Nicholas M. Law and Joshua S. Bloom and David Ciardi and George S. Djorgovski and Derek B. Fox and Avishay Gal-Yam and Carl C. Grillmair and Mansi M. Kasliwal and Peter E. Nugent and Eran O. Ofek and Robert M. Quimby and William T. Reach and Michael Shara and Lars Bildsten and S. Bradley Cenko and Andrew J. Drake and Alexei V. Filippenko and David J. Helfand and George Helou and D. Andrew Howell and Dovi Poznanski and Mark Sullivan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0906.5355},
year = {2010}
}