The Zwicky Transient Facility: Science Objectives
Creators: name: Graham, Matthew J.
name: Kulkarni, S. R.
name: Bellm, Eric C.
name: Adams, Scott M.
name: Barbarino, Cristina
name: Blagorodnova, Nadejda
name: Bodewits, Dennis
name: Bolin, Bryce
name: Brady, Patrick R.
name: Cenko, S. Bradley
name: Chang, Chan-Kao
name: Coughlin, Michael W.
name: De, Kishalay
name: Eadie, Gwendolyn
name: Farnham, Tony L.
name: Feindt, Ulrich
name: Franckowiak, Anna
name: Fremling, Christoffer
name: Gezari, Suvi
name: Ghosh, Shaon
name: Goldstein, Daniel A.
name: Golkhou, V. Zach
name: Goobar, Ariel
name: Ho, Anna Y. Q.
name: Huppenkothen, Daniela
name: Ivezić, Željko
name: Jones, R. Lynne
name: Juric, Mario
name: Kaplan, David L.
name: Kasliwal, Mansi M.
name: Kelley, Michael S. P.
name: Kupfer, Thomas
name: Lee, Chien-De
name: Lin, Hsing Wen
name: Lunnan, Ragnhild
name: Mahabal, Ashish A.
name: Miller, Adam A.
name: Ngeow, Chow-Choong
name: Nugent, Peter
name: Ofek, Eran O.
name: Prince, Thomas A.
name: Rauch, Ludwig
name: Roestel, Jan Van
name: Schulze, Steve
name: Singer, Leo P.
name: Sollerman, Jesper
name: Taddia, Francesco
name: Yan, Lin
name: Ye, Quan-Zhi
name: Yu, Po-Chieh
name: Barlow, Tom
name: Bauer, James
name: Beck, Ron
name: Belicki, Justin
name: Biswas, Rahul
name: Brinnel, Valéry
name: Brooke, Tim
name: Bue, Brian
name: Bulla, Mattia
name: Burruss, Rick
name: Connolly, Andrew
name: Cromer, John
name: Cunningham, Virginia
name: Dekany, Richard
name: Delacroix, Alex
name: Desai, Vandana
name: Duev, Dmitry A.
name: Feeney, Michael
name: Flynn, David
name: Frederick, Sara
name: Gal-Yam, Avishay
name: Giomi, Matteo
name: Groom, Steven
name: Hacopians, Eugean
name: Hale, David
name: Helou, George
name: Henning, John
name: Hover, David
name: Hillenbrand, Lynne A.
name: Howell, Justin
name: Hung, Tiara
name: Imel, David
name: Ip, Wing-Huen
name: Jackson, Edward
name: Kaspi, Shai
name: Kaye, Stephen
name: Kowalski, Marek Paul
name: Kramer, Emily
name: Kuhn, Michael
name: Landry, Walter
name: Laher, Russ R.
name: Mao, Peter
name: Masci, Frank J.
name: Monkewitz, Serge
name: Murphy, Patrick
name: Nordin, Jakob
name: Patterson, Maria T.
name: Penprase, Bryan
name: Porter, Michael
name: Rebbapragada, Umaa
Publisher: name: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Year: 2019
Subjects: subject: (stars:) supernovae: general
subject: surveys
subject: (galaxies:) quasars: general
subject: 520 Astronomie und zugeordnete Wissenschaften

description: 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.