The Zwicky Transient Facility: Science Objectives

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 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 which 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 $\sim$ 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.

26 pages, 7 figures, Published in PASP Focus Issue on the Zwicky Transient Facility

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Follow-up of the Neutron Star Bearing Gravitational Wave Candidate Events S190425z and S190426c with MMT and SOAR
• Discovery of Highly Blueshifted Broad Balmer and Metastable Helium Absorption Lines in a Tidal Disruption Event
• A new class of pulsating hot subdwarfs
• Towards Efficient Detection of Small Near-Earth Asteroids Using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)
• AXS: A framework for fast astronomical data processing based on Apache Spark