The Zwicky Transient Facility: System Overview, Performance, and First Results

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

Abstract

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is a new optical time-domain survey that uses the Palomar 48 inch Schmidt telescope. A custom-built wide-field camera provides a 47 deg^2 field of view and 8 s readout time, yielding more than an order of magnitude improvement in survey speed relative to its predecessor survey, the Palomar Transient Factory. We describe the design and implementation of the camera and observing system. The ZTF data system at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center provides near-real-time reduction to identify moving and varying objects. We outline the analysis pipelines, data products, and associated archive. Finally, we present on-sky performance analysis and first scientific results from commissioning and the early survey. ZTF's public alert stream will serve as a useful precursor for that of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

Additional Information

© 2018. The 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 August 21; accepted 2018 October 25; published 2018 December 7. 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. Major funding has been provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant No. AST-1440341 and by the ZTF partner institutions: 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. This work is partly based on observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, operated by the Nordic Optical Telescope Scientific Association at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. 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 NOTSA. This work is partly based on observations made with DOLoRes@TNG. 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. 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. E. Bellm is supported in part by the NSF AAG grant 1812779 and grant #2018-0908 from the Heising-Simons Foundation. 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. Bulla acknowledges support from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and the Swedish National Space Board. 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. 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. D. A. Goldstein acknowledges support from Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51408.001-A. Support for Program number HST-HF2-51408.001-A is provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555. 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. A. A. Miller is funded by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation in support of the Data Science Fellowship Program. 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). M. Rigault is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 759194—USNAC). J. Sollerman acknowledges support from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. 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. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Facilities: PO:1.2m - , PO:1.5m - , ARC - , DCT - , NOT. -

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