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 deg2 field of view and an 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 that 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.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 078001 |
| Journal | Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific |
| Volume | 131 |
| Issue number | 1001 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2019 |
Funding
C.-K. Chang, W.-H. Ip, C.-D. Lee, Z.-Y. Lin, C.-C. Ngeow, and P.-C. Yu thank the funding from Ministry of Science and Technology (Taiwan) under grant 104-2923-M-008-004-MY5, 104-2112-M-008-014-MY3, 105-2112-M-008-002-MY3, 106-2811-M-008-081, and 106-2112-M-008-007. M.T. Soumagnac acknowledges support by a grant from IMOS/ISA, the Ilan Ramon fellowship from the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology and the Benoziyo center for Astrophysics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. A. A. Miller is funded by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation in support of the Data Science Fellowship Program. M. Bulla and A. Goobar acknowledge support from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and the Swedish National Space Board. E. Bellm, B. Bolin, A. Connolly, V. Z. Golkhou, D. Huppenkothen, Z. Ivezić L. Jones, M. Juric, and M. Patterson acknowledge support from the University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Astronomy, and the DIRAC Institute. University of Washington’s DIRAC Institute is supported through generous gifts from the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, and the Washington Research Foundation. M. Juric and A. Connolly acknowledge the support of the Washington Research Foundation Data Science Term Chair fund, and the UW Provost’s Initiative in Data-Intensive Discovery. M. W. Coughlin is supported by the David and Ellen Lee Postdoctoral Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. S. Ghosh acknowledges the NSF award PHY-1607585. A. A. Mahabal acknowledges support from the following grants: NSF AST-1749235, NSF-1640818, and NASA 16-ADAP16-0232. E. Ofek is grateful for support by a grant from the Israeli Ministry of Science, ISF, Minerva, BSF, BSF transformative program, and the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and The Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 1829/12). B.T. Bolin acknowledges funding for the Asteroid Institute program provided by B612 Foundation, W.K. Bowes Jr. Foundation, P. Rawls Family Fund, and two anonymous donors in addition to general support from the B612 Founding Circle. M. M. Kasliwal and Q.-Z. Ye acknowledge support by the GROWTH (Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen) project funded by the National Science Foundation PIRE (Partnership in International Research and Education) program under Grant No 1545949. A. Gal-Yam is supported by the EU via ERC grant No. 725161, the Quantum Universe I-Core program, the ISF, the BSF Transformative program and by a Kimmel award. J. Sollerman acknowledges support from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. S. Gezari is supported in part by NSF CAREER grant 1454816 and NSF AAG grant 1616566. E. Bellm, A. Connolly, Z. Ivezić L. Jones, M. Juric, and M. Patterson acknowledge support from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is supported in part by the National Science Foundation through Cooperative Agreement 1258333 managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), and the Department of Energy under contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515 with the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Additional LSST funding comes from private donations, grants to universities, and in-kind support from LSSTC Institutional Members. Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin 48-inch Telescope and the 60-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project, a scientific collaboration among the California Institute of Technology, the Oskar Klein Centre, the Weizmann Institute of Science, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the TANGO Program of the University System of Taiwan. Further support is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant No. AST-1440341.
Keywords
- (galaxies:) quasars: general
- supernovae: general
- surveys
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Space and Planetary Science