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Related papers: The Zwicky Transient Facility: Science Objectives

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Microlensing surveys have discovered thousands of events with almost all events discovered within the Galactic bulge or toward the Magellanic clouds. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), while not designed to be a microlensing campaign, is…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2021-02-23 Michael S. Medford , Jessica R. Lu , William A. Dawson , Casey Y. Lam , Nathan R. Golovich , Edward F. Schlafly , Peter Nugent

The Bright Transient Survey (BTS) aims to obtain a classification spectrum for all bright ($m_\mathrm{peak}\,\leq\,18.5\,$mag) extragalactic transients found in the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) public survey. BTS critically relies on…

Detections of coalescing binary black holes by LIGO have opened a new window of transient astronomy. With increasing sensitivity of LIGO and participation of the Virgo detector in Cascina, Italy, we expect to soon detect coalescence of…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2017-09-19 Shaon Ghosh , Deep Chatterjee , David L. Kaplan , Patrick R. Brady , Angela Van Sistine

Strong gravitational lensing of supernovae is exceedingly rare. To date, only a handful of lensed supernovae are known. Despite this, lensed supernovae have emerged as a promising method for measuring the current expansion rate of the…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2023-08-02 M. R. Magee , A. Sainz de Murieta , T. E. Collett , W. Enzi

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has been observing the entire northern sky since the start of 2018 down to a magnitude of 20.5 ($5 \sigma$ for 30s exposure) in $g$, $r$, and $i$ filters. Over the course of two years, ZTF has obtained…

We present the goals, strategy and first results of the high-cadence Galactic plane survey using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). The goal of the survey is to unveil the Galactic population of short-period variable stars, including…

There is a growing concern about an impact of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite constellations on ground-based astronomical observations, in particular, on wide-field surveys in the optical and infrared. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF),…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2022-01-17 Przemek Mroz , Angel Otarola , Thomas A. Prince , Richard Dekany , Dmitry A. Duev , Matthew J. Graham , Steven L. Groom , Frank J. Masci , Michael S. Medford

We present a novel algorithm for scheduling the observations of time-domain imaging surveys. Our Integer Linear Programming approach optimizes an observing plan for an entire night by assigning targets to temporal blocks, enabling strict…

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…

The discovery rate of fast radio bursts (FRBs) is increasing dramatically thanks to new radio facilities. Meanwhile, wide-field instruments such as the 47 deg$^2$ Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey the optical sky to study transient and…

The forthcoming launch of the Ultraviolet Transient Astronomy Satellite (ULTRASAT) will transform our understanding of the transient ultraviolet sky by increasing our ability to identify transients due to its unprecedented 204 deg2 field of…

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is an optical wide-field variability survey carried out using a camera with a 7.8 square degree field of view mounted on the 48-in Oschin Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory. One of the key goals of…

Microlensing has a unique advantage for detecting dark objects in the Milky Way, such as free-floating planets, neutron stars, and stellar-mass black holes. Most microlensing surveys focus on the Galactic bulge, where higher stellar density…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-11-11 Ruocheng Zhai , Antonio C. Rodriguez , Shude Mao , Casey Y. Lam , Eric C. Bellm , Josiah Purdum , Frank J. Masci , Avery Wold

We describe ZStreak, a semi-real-time pipeline specialized in detecting small, fast-moving near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) that is currently operating on the data from the newly-commissioned Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey. Based on a…

Type Ia supernovae (SNe~Ia) in the nearby Hubble flow are excellent distance indicators in cosmology. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has observed a large sample of supernovae from an untargeted, rolling survey, reaching $20.8, 20.6,…

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is currently surveying the entire northern sky, including dense Galactic plane fields. Here, we present preliminary results of the search for gravitational microlensing events in the ZTF data collected…

Modern astronomical surveys, such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), are capable of detecting thousands of transient events per year, necessitating the use of automated and scalable data analysis techniques. Recent advances in machine…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2025-04-17 Betty X. Hu , Avi Loeb

We present an exploration of technosignature research that is possible using real-time alert brokers from surveys such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and the upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Nine alert brokers…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2025-06-18 Eleanor M. Gallay , James R. A. Davenport , Steve Croft