Browsing: Zwicky Transient Facility

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is an astronomical survey that utilizes the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California, USA. Launched in 2017, ZTF is designed to scan the entire northern sky every three nights using a specially designed wide-field camera that captures a field of view of 47 square degrees. This capability allows ZTF to detect a wide range of astronomical objects and phenomena that change with time, known as transients, including supernovae, variable stars, asteroids, comets, and near-Earth objects.

ZTF’s primary mission is to catalog these transient and variable objects, providing valuable data for further investigation by other observatories. The facility operates with high efficiency, enabling it to capture and catalogue thousands of changes in the night sky, thereby contributing to our understanding of the transient universe. Its data has been crucial for numerous studies in astrophysics, helping to elucidate the life cycles of stars, the behavior of black holes, and the properties of cosmic events.