The Photometric and Spectroscopic Evolution of Rapidly Evolving Extragalactic Transients in ZTF

Creators: Ho, Anna Y. Q.; Perley, Daniel A.; Gal-Yam, Avishay; Lunnan, Ragnhild; Sollerman, Jesper; Schulze, Steve; Das, Kaustav K.; Dobie, Dougal; Yao, Yuhan; Fremling, Christoffer; Adams, Scott; Anand, Shreya; Andreoni, Igor; Bellm, Eric C.; Bruch, Rachel J.; Burdge, Kevin B.; Castro-Tirado, Alberto J.; Dahiwale, Aishwarya; De, Kishalay; Dekany, Richard; Drake, Andrew J.; Duev, Dmitry A.; Graham, Matthew J.; Helou, George; Kaplan, David L.; Karambelkar, Viraj; Kasliwal, Mansi M.; Kool, Erik C.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Mahabal, Ashish A.; Medford, Michael S.; Miller, A. A.; Nordin, Jakob; Ofek, Eran; Petitpas, Glen; Riddle, Reed; Sharma, Yashvi; Smith, Roger; Stewart, Adam J.; Taggart, Kirsty; Tartaglia, Leonardo; Tzanidakis, Anastasios; Winters, Jan Martin

Abstract

We present 42 rapidly evolving (time spent above half-maximum brightness t_(1/2) ≾ 12d) extragalactic transients from Phase I of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), of which 22 have spectroscopic classifications. This is one of the largest systematically selected samples of day-timescale transients, and the first with spectroscopic classifications. Most can be classified as core-collapse supernovae (SNe), and we identify several predominant subtypes: (1) subluminous Type IIb or Type Ib SNe; (2) luminous Type Ibn or hybrid IIn/Ibn SNe; and (3) radio-loud, short-duration luminous events similar to AT2018cow. We conclude that rates quoted in the literature for rapidly evolving extragalactic transients are dominated by the subluminous events (mostly Type IIb SNe). From our spectroscopic classifications and radio, X-ray, and millimeter-band upper limits, we are motivated to consider the AT2018cow-like objects a distinct class, and use ZTF's systematic classification experiments to calculate that their rate does not exceed 0.1% of the local core-collapse SN rate, in agreement with previous work. By contrast, most other events are simply the extreme of a continuum of established SN types extending to ordinary timescales. The light curves of our objects are very similar to those of unclassified events in the literature, illustrating how spectroscopically classified samples of low-redshift objects in shallow surveys like ZTF can be used to photometrically classify larger numbers of events at higher redshift.

Additional Information

A.Y.Q.H. would like to thank Schuyler van Dyk for a thorough reading of the manuscript; Eliot Quataert, Dan Kasen, and Peter Nugent for useful discussions; and Miika Pursiainen for generously sharing the data for the DES objects. A.G.Y.'s research is supported by the EU via ERC grant No. 725161, the ISF GW excellence center, an IMOS space infrastructure grant and BSF/Transformative and GIF grants, as well as The Benoziyo Endowment Fund for the Advancement of Science, the Deloro Institute for Advanced Research in Space and Optics, The Veronika A. Rabl Physics Discretionary Fund, Minerva, Yeda-Sela and the Schwartz/Reisman Collaborative Science Program; A.G.Y. is the recipient of the Helen and Martin Kimmel Award for Innovative Investigation. R.L. acknowledges support from a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship within the Horizon 2020 European Union (EU) Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (H2020-MSCA-IF-2017-794467). D.K. is supported by NSF grant AST-1816492. E.C.K. acknowledges support from the G.R.E.A.T research environment funded by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council, under project number 2016-06012, and support from The Wenner-Gren Foundations. A.A.M. is funded by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation (LSSTC), the Brinson Foundation, and the Moore Foundation in support of the LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program; he also receives support as a CIERA Fellow by the CIERA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics, Northwestern University). E.O.O. acknowledges support from the Israeli Science Foundation, The Israeli Ministry of Science, The Bi-National Science foundation, and Minerva. A.J.C.T. acknowledges Y.-D. Hu and A. F. Azamat for their assistance regarding the GTC observation. L.T. acknowledges support from MIUR (PRIN 2017 grant 20179ZF5KS). Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48-inch and the 60-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-1440341 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, Los Alamos National Laboratories, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW. The ZTF forced-photometry service was funded under the Heising-Simons Foundation grant #12540303 (PI: Graham). The GROWTH Marshal was supported by the GROWTH project funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant No 1545949. SED Machine is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1106171. The data presented here were obtained in part with ALFOSC, which is provided by the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (IAA) under a joint agreement with the University of Copenhagen and NOT. Based on observations made with the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), installed at the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, in the island of La Palma. Observations reported here were obtained at the MMT Observatory, a joint facility of the University of Arizona and the Smithsonian Institution. The Liverpool Telescope is operated on the island of La Palma by Liverpool John Moores University in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias with financial support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. Based on observations made with the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) operated on the island of La Palma by the Fundación Galileo Galilei of the INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica) at the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The Submillimeter Array is a joint project between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics and is funded by the Smithsonian Institution and the Academia Sinica. This work is based on observations carried out under project number S19BC with the IRAM NOEMA Interferometer. IRAM is supported by INSU/CNRS (France), MPG (Germany) and IGN (Spain). The Australian SKA Pathfinder is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility which is managed by CSIRO. Operation of ASKAP is funded by the Australian Government with support from the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. ASKAP uses the resources of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. Establishment of ASKAP, the Murchison Radioastronomy Observatory and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre are initiatives of the Australian Government, with support from the Government of Western Australia and the Science and Industry Endowment Fund. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the Observatory site. Parts of this research were conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), through project number CE170100004. This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018). The ztfquery code was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n°759194 - USNAC, PI: Rigault). The Legacy Surveys consist of three individual and complementary projects: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS; Proposal ID #2014B-0404; PIs: David Schlegel and Arjun Dey), the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS; NOAO Prop. ID #2015A-0801; PIs: Zhou Xu and Xiaohui Fan), and the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS; Prop. ID #2016A-0453; PI: Arjun Dey). DECaLS, BASS and MzLS together include data obtained, respectively, at the Blanco telescope, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NSF's NOIRLab; the Bok telescope, Steward Observatory, University of Arizona; and the Mayall telescope, Kitt Peak National Observatory, NOIRLab. The Legacy Surveys project is honored to be permitted to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du'ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O'odham Nation. This project used data obtained with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which was constructed by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico and the Ministerio da Ciencia, Tecnologia e Inovacao, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Energeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnologicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut de Ciencies de l'Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de Fisica d'Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig Maximilians Universitat Munchen and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, NSF's NOIRLab, the University of Nottingham, the Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, and Texas A&M University. The Legacy Survey team makes use of data products from the Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology. NEOWISE is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Legacy Surveys imaging of the DESI footprint is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH1123, by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility under the same contract; and by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Astronomical Sciences under Contract No. AST-0950945 to NOAO. Facilities: Hale, Swift, EVLA, VLA, Liverpool:2m, PO:1.2m, PO:1.5m, NOT, GTC, Sloan, AAVSO, ASKAP, Keck:1, IRAM:NOEMA, SMA, MMT, TNG, ASKAP, GALEX, PS1, CTIO:2MASS, FLWO:2MASS, WISE, NEOWISE, Blanco Software: CASA (McMullin et al. 2007), astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), scipy (Virtanen et al. 2020), ztfquery (Rigault 2018), extinction, penquins

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