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Zwicky Transient Facility

Systematic Exploration of the Dynamic Sky

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First Wolf-Rayet star observed as supernova

January 12th, 2022

A first-of-its-kind exploding star – thought to have existed only in theory – was recently discovered with the Zwicky Transient Facility by an international team of astronomers.

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Public Data Release 8

November 3rd, 2021

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and IPAC at the California Institute of Technology announce the 8th ZTF Public Data Release. ZTF is an optical time-domain survey covering the northern sky visible from Palomar Observatory.

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Public Data Release 7

September 8th, 2021

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and IPAC at the California Institute of Technology announce the seventh ZTF Public Data Release. ZTF is an optical time-domain survey covering the northern sky visible from Palomar Observatory.

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Astronomers discover an unusually short gamma-ray burst from the death of a massive star

July 26th, 2021

ZTF and a host of other astronomical observatories have teamed up to identify a rather unusual gamma-ray burst (GRB) - the most powerful event in the universe. Caused by the death of a massive star, this GRB lasted much shorted than expected defying a clear classification of these extraordinary cosmic events.

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A White Dwarf Living on the Edge

July 1st, 2021

Astronomers have identified a white dwarf so massive that it might collapse

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Public Data Release 6

June 30th, 2021

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and IPAC at the California Institute of Technology announce the sixth ZTF Public Data Release. ZTF is an optical time-domain survey covering the northern sky visible from Palomar Observatory.

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Machine learning helps astronomers classify dying stars

April 28th, 2021

Astronomers from the Zwicky Transient Facility team announce the first fully automated classification of Type Ia supernova.

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Public Data Release 5

March 31st, 2021

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and IPAC at the California Institute of Technology announce the fifth ZTF Public Data Release. ZTF is an optical time-domain survey covering the northern sky visible from Palomar Observatory.

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A hungry black hole first discovered by ZTF is the likely source of a rare neutrino

February 22nd, 2021

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Public Data Release 4

December 9th, 2020

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and IPAC at the California Institute of Technology announce the fourth ZTF Public Data Release. ZTF is an optical time-domain survey covering the northern sky visible from Palomar Observatory.

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Celebrating ZTF-I & Soft Launch of ZTF-II

October 26th, 2020

On Friday Oct 23, 2020, a virtual meeting was held to celebrate the conclusion of Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) Phase I ("ZTF-1") which was fully commissioned by March 2018 and formally ended this Fall. The meeting also serves as a formal vote of thanks for the ZTF Community Science Advisory Committee (CSAC; Chair, Steve Ridgway, NSF's OIR Lab; Marcel Augueros, Lisa Storrie-Lombardi, Juna Kollmeier, Marc Pinsonneault, Mukremin Kilic, David Sand).

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Astronomers gather clues about unseen cataclysmic collisions

September 14th, 2020

Two large international collaborations of astronomers joined forces to look for light from some of the most cataclysmic events – the collisions of a neutron star and black hole. They did not find it this time, but the scientific journey has provided important insights on how to better hunt for these colossal, yet elusive phenomena in the future.

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ZTF Finds Closest Known Asteroid to Fly By Earth

August 19th, 2020

On August 16, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a robotic survey camera located at Palomar Observatory near San Diego, spotted an asteroid that had, just hours earlier, traveled only 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) above Earth's surface. Designated 2020 QG, it is the closest known asteroid to fly by Earth without impacting the planet. The previous known record-holder is asteroid 2011 CQ1, discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey in 2011, which passed above Earth about 1,550 miles (2,500 kilometers) higher than 2020 QG.

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Spectacular Ultraviolet Flash May Finally Explain How White Dwarfs Explode

July 23rd, 2020

For just the second time ever, astrophysicists have spotted a spectacular flash of ultraviolet (UV) light accompanying a white dwarf explosion. An extremely rare type of supernova, the event is poised to offer insights into several long-standing mysteries, including what causes white dwarfs to explode, how dark energy accelerates the cosmos and how the universe creates heavy metals, such as iron.

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Black Hole Collision May Have Exploded with Light

June 25th, 2020

When two black holes spiral around each other and ultimately collide, they send out ripples in space and time called gravitational waves. Because black holes do not give off light, these events are not expected to shine with any light waves, or electromagnetic radiation. But some theorists have come up with ways in which a black hole merger might explode with light. Now, for the first time, astronomers have seen evidence for one of these light-producing scenarios. The press report on this result can be found at https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/black-hole-collision-may-have-exploded-light

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Public Data Release 3

June 24th, 2020

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and IPAC at the California Institute of Technology announce the third ZTF Public Data Release. ZTF is an optical time-domain survey covering the northern sky visible from Palomar Observatory.

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First Asteroid Found Inside Orbit of Venus

January 15th, 2020

A rare asteroid orbiting snugly within the inner confines of our solar system has been discovered by Caltech's Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF, a survey camera based at Palomar Observatory. The newfound body, named 2020 AV2, is the first asteroid found to orbit entirely within the orbit of Venus.

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Public Data Release 2

December 11th, 2019

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and IPAC at the California Institute of Technology announce the second ZTF Public Data Release. ZTF is an optical time-domain survey covering the northern sky visible from Palomar Observatory.

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The Zwicky Transient Facility Begins Nightly Concurrent Observations of TESS Northern Fields

July 27th, 2019

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has started to conduct a nightly survey of the TESS fields in g- and r-band. In 2019-2020 all of the 13 northern TESS sectors will be covered by ZTF if accessible from Palomar. In addition to the ZTF alert streams provided by various alert brokers, all ZTF-TESS alerts will be released nightly to the public via ZTF's bucket on Google Cloud in a compressed tarball. ZTF anticipates that light curves for all objects observed concurrently by TESS and ZTF will be made available publicly within one month of the end of a TESS sector observation campaign.

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ZTF found Dead Stars Whipping Around Each Other in Minutes

July 25th, 2019

Two dead stars have been spotted whipping around each other every seven minutes. The rare celestial find was made using Caltech's Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a state-of-the-art sky survey at Palomar Observatory that rapidly scans the night skies looking for anything that moves, blinks, or otherwise varies in brightness.

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ZTF Spots Asteroid with Shortest Year

July 8th, 2019

Astronomers have spotted an unusual asteroid with the shortest "year" known for any asteroid. The rocky body, dubbed 2019 LF6, is about a kilometer in size and circles the sun roughly every 151 days. In its orbit, the asteroid swings out beyond Venus and, at times, comes closer in than Mercury, which circles the sun every 88 days. 2019 LF6 is one of only 20 known "Atira" asteroids, whose orbits fall entirely within Earth's.

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Public Data Release 1

May 8th, 2019

The first public data release of the Zwicky Transient Facility (#ZTF) is out! This release includes data products from the public portion of the survey spanning March to December 2018. Products include ~3.4 million single-exposure images, ~102,000 co-added images, accompanying source catalog files containing ~63 billion sources detected from those images, and ~2 billion light curves constructed from the single-exposure extractions.

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Zwicky Transient Facility Nabs Several Supernovae a Night

February 7th, 2019

The results are rolling in from Caltech's newest state-of-the-art sky-surveying camera, which began operations at the Palomar Observatory in March 2018. Called the Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF, the new instrument has so far discovered 50 small near-Earth asteroids and more than 1,100 supernovae, and it has observed more than 1 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

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Astronomers Find Clues to the Origins of Exploding Dead Stars

February 7th, 2019

Dying stars known as Type Ia supernovae are often referred to as standard candles because they all emit the same, well-known amount of light when they explode and can therefore be used to measure distances in the universe. GROWTH astronomers have now observed a very peculiar Type Ia supernova suggesting that while these dying stars shine equally brightly, they may not all die in the same way.

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Asteroid from ‘Rare Species’ Sighted in the Cosmic Wild

February 5th, 2019

Astronomers have discovered an asteroid looping through the inner solar system on an exotic orbit. The unusual object is among the first asteroids ever found whose orbit is confined almost entirely within the orbit of Venus. The asteroid's existence hints at potentially significant numbers of space rocks arcing unseen in uncharted regions nearer to the sun.

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Zwicky Transient Facility Opens Its Eyes to the Volatile Cosmos

November 14th, 2017

The latest workhorse camera at the Palomar Observatory can scan the majority of the northern sky every night, looking for cosmic events as they happen.

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