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.
Highlights
The past decade has seen an explosion in time-domain astronomy driven by the availability of new instruments and facilities dedicated to repeated observations of large areas of sky
These are defined around particular areas of interest and we present here the expected outcomes and science deliverables of each: the physics of supernovae (SNe) and relativistic explosions (Section 3); multi-messenger astrophysics (Section 4); cosmological distances from Type Ia SNe (Section 5); cosmology with gravitationally lensed SNe (Section 6); active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and tidal disruption events (TDEs) (Section 7), Galactic science (Section 8), small solar system bodies (Section 9), and astroinformatics and astrostatistics (Section 10)
Given how bright the early-time emission was from GW170817 (e.g., Drout et al 2017; Kasliwal et al 2017; Arcavi et al 2017; Nicholl et al 2017), we may even be able to see a significant fraction with shorter observations, but we are baselining our plans to be able to detect counterparts 10× fainter than GW170817 at 120 Mpc
Summary
The past decade has seen an explosion in time-domain astronomy driven by the availability of new instruments and facilities dedicated to repeated observations of large areas of sky. A number of surveys, e.g., Catalina Real-Time Survey (CRTS; Drake et al 2009), Palomar Transient Factory (PTF/iPTF; Law et al 2009), Panoramic Survey Telescope, and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS or PS; Kaiser 2004), All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASASSN; Shappee et al 2014), and the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS; Tonry et al 2018) have opened up the exploration of temporal behavior from solar system objects to variable stars in the Galaxy to relativistic explosions across the universe. Kasliwal et al (2019) describe a web-based interface used by the ZTF collaboration to identify, track, and follow-up transients of interest
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