Related papers: The Zwicky Transient Facility
An astronomical complex intended to detect optical transients (OTs) in a wide field and follow them up with high time resolution investigation is described.
We are searching for hot, constant-color, offset optical flares in the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) data stream that are ${>}10''$ from any galaxy in public imaging data from the PanSTARRS survey. Here, we present the first discovery…
Exploration of the transient Universe is an exciting and fast-emerging area within radio astronomy. Known transient phenomena range in time scales from sub-nanoseconds to years or longer, thus spanning a huge range in time domain and…
LOFAR, the Low Frequency Array, is a new radio telescope under construction in the Netherlands, designed to operate between 30 and 240 MHz. The Transients Key Project is one of the four Key Science Projects which comprise the core LOFAR…
Transient radio sources, such as fast radio bursts, intermittent pulsars, and rotating radio transients, can offer a wealth of information regarding extreme emission physics as well as the intervening interstellar and/or intergalactic…
A completely new under-water dark-room test facility (UWDTF) has been built at the University of Winnipeg during 2021-2023, for the testing of the equipments, optical components and detectors before they might be used in different…
We present ZTF18abvkwla (the "Koala"), a fast blue optical transient discovered in the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) One-Day Cadence (1DC) Survey. ZTF18abvkwla has a number of features in common with the groundbreaking transient…
We have realised a simple prototype system to perform searches for short timescale optical transients, utilising the novel drift scan imaging technique described by Tingay (2020). We used two coordinated and aligned cameras, with an overlap…
Exploration of the time variability on the sky over a broad range of flux levels and wavelengths is rapidly becoming a new frontier of astronomical research. We describe here briefly the Palomar-QUEST survey being carried out from the…
Most major discoveries in astronomy have come from unplanned discoveries made by surveying the Universe in a new way, rather than by testing a hypothesis or conducting an investigation with planned outcomes. Next generation radio continuum…
Automating real-time anomaly detection is essential for identifying rare transients, with modern survey telescopes generating tens of thousands of alerts per night, and future telescopes, such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, projected to…
X-ray transients are among the most enigmatic objects in the cosmic sky. The unpredictability and underlying nature of their transient behavior has prompted much study in recent years. While significant progress has been made in this field,…
Photonic computing has emerged as a promising platform for accelerating computational tasks with high degrees of parallelism, such as image processing and neural network. We present meta-DFT (discrete Fourier transform), a single layer…
Current and future astronomical survey facilities provide a remarkably rich opportunity for transient astronomy, combining unprecedented fields of view with high sensitivity and the ability to access previously unexplored wavelength…
The Fast Fourier Transform(FFT) is a classic signal processing algorithm that is utilized in a wide range of applications. For image processing, FFT computes on every pixel's value of an image, regardless of their properties in frequency…
An interesting transient has been detected in one of our three Dark Energy Camera deep fields. Observations of these deep fields take advantage of the high red sensitivity of DECam on the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory Blanco…
Astrophysical transients have been observed for millennia and have shaped our most basic assumptions about the Universe. In the last century, systematic searches have grown from detecting handfuls of transients per year to over 7000 in 2018…
The modulation transfer function (MTF) is widely used to characterise the performance of optical systems. Measuring it is costly and it is thus rarely available for a given lens specimen. Instead, MTFs based on simulations or, at best, MTFs…
LOFAR, the "low-frequency array", will be one of the first in a new generation of radio telescopes and Square Kilometer Array (SKA) pathfinders that are highly flexible in capability because they are largely software driven. LOFAR will not…
Astrophysical transients with rapid development on sub-hour timescales are intrinsically rare. Due to their short durations, events like stellar superflares, optical flashes from gamma-ray bursts, and shock breakouts from young supernovae…