Related papers: The Zwicky Transient Facility

One of the new frontiers of astronomical research is the exploration of time variability on the sky at different wavelengths and flux levels. We have carried out a pilot project using DPOSS data to study strong variables and transients, and…

We present program objectives and specifications for the first generation Ultra-Fast Astronomy (UFA) observatory which will explore a new astrophysical phase space by characterizing the variability of the optical (320 nm - 650 nm) sky in…

Future surveys such as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will observe an order of magnitude more astrophysical transient events than any previous survey before. With this deluge of photometric data,…

Image subtraction is essential for transient detection in time-domain astronomy. The point spread function (PSF), photometric scaling, and sky background generally vary with time and across the field-of-view for imaging data taken with…

We present RAPID (Real-time Automated Photometric IDentification), a novel time-series classification tool capable of automatically identifying transients from within a day of the initial alert, to the full lifetime of a light curve. Using…

We present a variability, color and morphology based classifier, designed to identify transients, persistently variable, and non-variable sources, from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) Data Release 11 (DR11) light curves of extended and…

Large time-domain sky surveys generate extensive multi-year catalogs of light curves in which scientifically valuable transients, such as supernovae (SNe), are vastly outnumbered by artifacts and routine star variability. While supervised…

We present the Palomar Transient Factory discoveries and the photometric and spectroscopic observations of PTF11kmb and PTF12bho. We show that both transients have properties consistent with the class of calcium-rich gap transients,…

We describe the APERture Tile In Focus (Apertif) system, a phased array feed (PAF) upgrade of the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope which has transformed this telescope into a high-sensitivity, wide field-of-view L-band imaging and…

Wide-field time domain facilities detect transient events in large numbers through difference imaging. For example, Zwicky Transient Facility produces alerts for hundreds of thousands of transient events per night, a rate set to be dwarfed…

We provide methods which recover planar scene geometry by utilizing the transient histograms captured by a class of close-range time-of-flight (ToF) distance sensor. A transient histogram is a one dimensional temporal waveform which encodes…

We describe the performance of our latest generations of sensitive wide-band high-resolution digital Fast Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FFTS). Their design, optimized for a wide range of radio astronomical applications, is presented.…

We describe a scalable distributed imaging algorithm framework for next-generation radio telescopes, managing the Fourier transform from apertures to sky (or vice versa) with a focus on minimising memory load, data transfers, and…

We identify minimal observing cadence requirements that enable photometric astronomical surveys to detect and recognize fast and explosive transients and fast transient features. Observations in two different filters within a short time…

A relatively unexplored phase space of transients and stellar variability is that of second and sub-second time-scales. We describe a new optical observatory operating in the Negev desert in Israel, with a 55 cm aperture, a field of view of…

We present a method for characterizing image-subtracted objects based on shapelet analysis to identify transient events in ground-based time-domain surveys. We decompose the image-subtracted objects onto a set of discrete Zernike…

Time of flight cameras may emerge as the 3-D sensor of choice. Today, time of flight sensors use phase-based sampling, where the phase delay between emitted and received, high-frequency signals encodes distance. In this paper, we present a…

We present five new outbursting AM CVn systems and one candidate discovered as part of an ongoing search for such systems using the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF). This is the first large-area, systematic search for AM CVn systems using…

Although several existing and upcoming telescopes have imaging as their primary mode, they also have a sensitive phased-array mode with a multiple-beam forming capability enabling high time resolution studies of several types of objects,…

We explore the potential of the ongoing Zwicky-Transient-Facility (ZTF) survey for studying Intra-Night Optical Variability (INOV) of active galactic nuclei (AGN), in particular for picking rare events of large INOV amplitudes, whose…