Related papers: Anomaly detection in the Zwicky Transient Facility…

We apply the model-agnostic anomaly detection method Cathode - originally developed for particle physics - to search for stellar streams in Gaia data. We combine Cathode with Via Machinae 3.0: a re-optimized version of the stellar stream…

Identification of anomalous light curves within time-domain surveys is often challenging. In addition, with the growing number of wide-field surveys and the volume of data produced exceeding astronomers ability for manual evaluation,…

We present a model-independent, photometry-only framework for identifying strongly lensed supernovae when multiple images are unresolved and blended into a single point source. Building on the simulation-based methodology of Bag et al.…

Classification algorithms have been widely adopted to detect anomalies for various systems, e.g., IoT, cloud and face recognition, under the common assumption that the data source is clean, i.e., features and labels are correctly set.…

When planning a survey for astronomical transients, many factors such as cadence, filter choice, sky coverage, and depth of observations need to be balanced in order to optimize the scientific gain of the survey. Here we present a software…

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…

We present a search for extragalactic fast blue optical transients (FBOTs) during Phase I of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). We identify 38 candidates with durations above half-maximum light 1 d < t1/2 < 12 d, of which 28 have blue…

Periodic variability in active galactic nuclei (AGN) light curves has been proposed as a signature of close supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries. Recently, 181 candidate SMBH binaries were identified in Gaia DR3 based on apparently…

We present photometry and spectroscopy of four hydrogen-poor luminous supernovae discovered during the two-month science commissioning and early operations of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey. Three of these objects, SN2018bym…

During the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) Phase-I operation, 78 hydrogen-poor superluminous supernovae (SLSNe-I) were discovered in less than three years, making up the largest sample from a single survey. This paper (Paper I) presents the…

The unprecedented volume and quality of data from space- and ground-based telescopes present an opportunity for machine learning to identify new classes of variable stars and peculiar systems that may have been overlooked by traditional…

We used random forest algorithms to classify all objects in a large portion of the sky, using optical light curves obtained, or built from images provided, by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). We compare different selection sets based on…

How can we discover objects we did not know existed within the large datasets that now abound in astronomy? We present an outlier detection algorithm that we developed, based on an unsupervised Random Forest. We test the algorithm on more…

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are known to exhibit optical/UV variability and most of them can be well modeled by the damped random walks. Physical processes that are not related to the accretion disk, such as tidal disruption events (TDE)…

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are known to exhibit stochastic variability across a wide range of timescales and wavelengths. AGN flares are extreme outbursts that deviate from this typical behavior and may trace a range of energetic…

Optical variability is a key observational probe for studying the accretion dynamics and central engine physics of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). The quality and completeness of light curves have a direct impact on variability studies,…

New time-domain surveys, such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), will observe millions of transient alerts each night, making standard approaches of visually identifying new and interesting transients…

Changing-look active galactic nuclei (CLAGNs) are a unique population of AGNs that exhibit the appearance (turn-on) or disappearance (turn-off) of broad emission lines. This study aims to explore the intrinsic mechanisms of CLAGNs by…

A reexamination of period finding algorithms is prompted by new large area astronomical sky surveys that can identify billions of individual sources having a thousand or more observations per source. This large increase in data necessitates…

Our understanding of the Universe has profited from deliberate, targeted studies of known phenomena, as well as from serendipitous, unexpected discoveries, such as the discovery of a complex variability pattern in the direction of KIC…