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Published July 2019 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

The Zwicky Transient Facility: Science Objectives

Graham, Matthew J. ORCID icon
Kulkarni, S. R. ORCID icon
Bellm, Eric C. ORCID icon
Adams, S. M. ORCID icon
Barbarino, Cristina ORCID icon
Blagorodnova, N. ORCID icon
Bodewits, Dennis ORCID icon
Bolin, Bryce ORCID icon
Brady, Patrick R. ORCID icon
Cenko, S. B. ORCID icon
Chang, Chan-Kao ORCID icon
Coughlin, M. W. ORCID icon
De, Kishalay ORCID icon
Eadie, Gwendolyn ORCID icon
Farnham, Tony L. ORCID icon
Feindt, U. ORCID icon
Franckowiak, A.
Fremling, C. ORCID icon
Gezari, Suvi ORCID icon
Ghosh, Shaon ORCID icon
Goldstein, Daniel A. ORCID icon
Golkhou, V. Zach ORCID icon
Goobar, Ariel ORCID icon
Ho, Anna Y. Q. ORCID icon
Huppenkothen, Daniela ORCID icon
Ivezić, Željko ORCID icon
Jones, R. Lynne ORCID icon
Jurić, Mario ORCID icon
Kaplan, David L. ORCID icon
Kasliwal, Mansi M. ORCID icon
Kelley, Michael S. P. ORCID icon
Kupfer, T. ORCID icon
Lee, Chien-De ORCID icon
Lin, Hsing Wen ORCID icon
Lunnan, Ragnhild ORCID icon
Mahabal, Ashish ORCID icon
Miller, Adam A. ORCID icon
Ngeow, Chow-Choong ORCID icon
Nugent, P. E. ORCID icon
Ofek, Eran O. ORCID icon
Prince, Thomas A. ORCID icon
Rauch, L.
van Roestel, J. ORCID icon
Schulze, S. ORCID icon
Singer, Leo P. ORCID icon
Sollerman, J. ORCID icon
Taddia, F. ORCID icon
Yan, Lin ORCID icon
Ye, Quan-Zhi ORCID icon
Yu, Po-Chieh ORCID icon
Barlow, Tom A.
Bauer, James ORCID icon
Beck, Ron
Belicki, Justin
Biswas, Rahul ORCID icon
Brinnel, Valery
Brooke, Tim
Bue, Brian ORCID icon
Bulla, Mattia ORCID icon
Buruss, Rick
Connolly, Andrew
Cunningham, Virginia ORCID icon
Dekany, Richard ORCID icon
Delacroix, Alex
Desai, Vandana ORCID icon
Duev, Dmitry A. ORCID icon
Feeney, Michael
Flynn, David
Frederick, Sara ORCID icon
Gal-Yam, A. ORCID icon
Giomi, Matteo
Groom, Steven L. ORCID icon
Hacopians, Eugean
Hale, David
Helou, G. ORCID icon
Henning, John
Hover, David
Hillenbrand, Lynne A.
Howell, Justin ORCID icon
Hung, Tiara ORCID icon
Imel, David ORCID icon
Ip, Wing-Huen ORCID icon
Jackson, Edward
Kaspi, S. ORCID icon
Kaye, Stephen
Kowalski, Marek ORCID icon
Kramer, Emily ORCID icon
Kuhn, Michael A. ORCID icon
Landry, Walter
Laher, Russ R. ORCID icon
Mao, Peter H.
Masci, Frank J. ORCID icon
Monkewitz, Serge
Murphy, Patrick
Nordin, Jakob ORCID icon
Patterson, Maria T. ORCID icon
Penprase, B. E. ORCID icon
Porter, Michael ORCID icon
Rebbapragada, U. D. ORCID icon
Reiley, Daniel J.
Riddle, Reed ORCID icon
Rigault, M. ORCID icon
Rodriguez, Hector
Rusholme, B. ORCID icon
van Santen, J.
Shupe, D. L. ORCID icon
Smith, Roger M. ORCID icon
Soumagnac, Maayane T. ORCID icon
Stein, Robert
Surace, Jason ORCID icon
Szkody, Paula ORCID icon
Terek, Scott
Van Sistine, Angela ORCID icon
van Velzen, Sjoert ORCID icon
Vestrand, W. T. ORCID icon
Walters, Richard ORCID icon
Ward, Charlotte A. ORCID icon
Zhang, Chaoran ORCID icon
Zolkower, Jeffry

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 deg^2 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.

Additional Information

© 2019 Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2018 September 6; accepted 2019 January 21; published 2019 May 22. 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. J. Sollerman acknowledges support from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. 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). 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. S. Gezari is supported in part by NSF CAREER grant 1454816 and NSF AAG grant 1616566. 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. 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. 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. 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.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. J. Bauer, T. Farnham, and M. Kelley gratefully acknowledge the NASA/University of Maryland/MPC Augmentation through the NASA Planetary Data System Cooperative Agreement NNX16AB16A. 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. A. Mahabal acknowledges support from the following grants: NSF AST-1749235, NSF-1640818, and NASA 16-ADAP16-0232. 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. M. Rigault acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 759194—USNAC). Facilities: PO:1.2 m - , PO:1.5m -.

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Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
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