The Zwicky Transient Facility: Science Objectives
Abstract
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 deg field of view and 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 which 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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1902.01945,
title = {The Zwicky Transient Facility: Science Objectives},
author = {Matthew J. Graham and S. R. Kulkarni and Eric C. Bellm and Scott M. Adams and Cristina Barbarino and Nadejda Blagorodnova and Dennis Bodewits and Bryce Bolin and Patrick R. Brady and S. Bradley Cenko and Chan-Kao Chang and Michael W. Coughlin and Kishalay De and Gwendolyn Eadie and Tony L. Farnham and Ulrich Feindt and Anna Franckowiak and Christoffer Fremling and Avishay Gal-yam and Suvi Gezari and Shaon Ghosh and Daniel A. Goldstein and V. Zach Golkhou and Ariel Goobar and Anna Y. Q. Ho and Daniela Huppenkothen and Zeljko Ivezic and R. Lynne Jones and Mario Juric and David L. Kaplan and Mansi M. Kasliwal and Michael S. P. Kelley and Thomas Kupfer and Chien-De Lee and Hsing Wen Lin and Ragnhild Lunnan and Ashish A. Mahabal and Adam A. Miller and Chow-Choong Ngeow and Peter Nugent and Eran O. Ofek and Thomas A. Prince and Ludwig Rauch and Jan van Roestel and Steve Schulze and Leo P. Singer and Jesper Sollerman and Francesco Taddia and Lin Yan and Quan-Zhi Ye and Po-Chieh Yu and Igor Andreoni and Tom Barlow and James Bauer and Ron Beck and Justin Belicki and Rahul Biswas and Valery Brinnel and Tim Brooke and Brian Bue and Mattia Bulla and Kevin Burdge and Rick Burruss and Andrew Connolly and John Cromer and Virginia Cunningham and Richard Dekany and Alex Delacroix and Vandana Desai and Dmitry A. Duev and Eugean Hacopians and David Hale and George Helou and John Henning and David Hover and Lynne A. Hillenbrand and Justin Howell and Tiara Hung and David Imel and Wing-Huen Ip and Edward Jackson and Shai Kaspi and Stephen Kaye and Marek Kowalski and Emily Kramer and Michael Kuhn and Walter Landry and Russ R. Laher and Peter Mao and Frank J. Masci and Serge Monkewitz and Patrick Murphy and Jakob Nordin and Maria T. Patterson and Bryan Penprase and Michael Porter and Umaa Rebbapragada and Dan Reiley and Reed Riddle and Mickael Rigault and Hector Rodriguez and Ben Rusholme and Jakob van Santen and David L. Shupe and Roger M. Smith and Maayane T. Soumagnac and Robert Stein and Jason Surace and Paula Szkody and Scott Terek and Angela van Sistine and Sjoert van Velzen and W. Thomas Vestrand and Richard Walters and Charlotte Ward and Chaoran Zhang and Jeffry Zolkower},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.01945},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
26 pages, 7 figures, Published in PASP Focus Issue on the Zwicky Transient Facility