Cited by 1,141Gamma-ray bursts and supernovaeAstronomy and Astrophysical ResearchStellar, planetary, and galactic studies

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Palomar Transient Factory: System Overview, Performance, and First Results

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Abstract

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a fully-automated, wide-field survey aimed at a systematic exploration of the optical transient sky. The transient survey is performed using a new 8.1 square degree camera installed on the 48 inch Samuel Oschin telescope at Palomar Observatory; colors and light curves for detected transients are obtained with the automated Palomar 60 inch telescope. PTF uses 80% of the 1.2 m and 50% of the 1.5 m telescope time. With an exposure of 60 s the survey reaches a depth of m g ′ ≈ 21.3 and m R ≈ 20.6 (5σ, median seeing). Four major experiments are planned for the five-year project: (1) a 5 day cadence supernova search; (2) a rapid transient search with cadences between 90 s and 1 day; (3) a search for eclipsing binaries and transiting planets in Orion; and (4) a 3π sr deep H-alpha survey. PTF provides automatic, real-time transient classification and follow-up, as well as a database including every source detected in each frame. This paper summarizes the PTF project, including several months of on-sky performance tests of the new survey camera, the observing plans, and the data reduction strategy. We conclude by detailing the first 51 PTF optical transient detections, found in commissioning data.

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Research works printed but not linked: 6

  1. M. S. acknowledges sup- port from the Royal Society and the University of Oxford Fell Fund. REFERENCES
  2. Aldering, G., Adam, G., Antilogus, P., Astier, P., Bacon, R., Bongard, S., Bonnaud, C., Copin, Y., et al. 2002, Proc. SPIE, 4836, 61
  3. Ashe, M. C., Bonati, M., & Heathcote, S. 2002, Proc. SPIE, 4848, 508
  4. Cuillandre, J.-C., Luppino, G. A., Starr, B. M., & Isani, S. 2000, Proc. SPIE, 4008, 1010
  5. Mahabal, A., Djorgovski, S. G., Williams, R., Drake, A., Donalek, C., Graham, M., Moghaddam, B., Turmon, M., et al. 2008b, in AIP Conf. Ser. 1082, 287-293
  6. Rahmer, G., Smith, R., Velur, V., Hale, D., Law, N., Bui, K., Petrie, H., & Dekany, R. 2008, Proc. SPIE, 7014

Cited by

Sorted by citations

  • MODULES FOR EXPERIMENTS IN STELLAR ASTROPHYSICS (MESA): PLANETS, OSCILLATIONS, ROTATION, AND MASSIVE STARS

    Paxton, B., Cantiello, M., Arras, P., Bildsten, L., Brown, E. F., Dotter, A., Mankovich, C. R., Montgomery, M. H., Stello, D., Timmes, F. X., et al. (2013) · The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series · doi:10.1088/0067-0049/208/1/4 · Cited by 3,495

    “Advances in optical detector technology, computer processing power, and data storage capability have enabled new sky surveys (e.g., the Sloan Digital Sky Survey; York et al. 2000); triggered many new optical transient surveys, such as the Palomar Transient Factory (Law et al. 2009) and Pan-STARRS1 (Kaiser et al. 2010)…”
    BackgroundSelf-citation
  • LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

    Ivezić, Ž., Kahn, S. M., Tyson, J. A., Abel, B., Acosta, E., Allsman, R., Alonso, D., AlSayyad, Y., Anderson, S. F., Andrew, J., et al. (2019) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ab042c · Cited by 4,357

    “Rapid cadence makes it possible to serendipitously catch very short-lived events, such as eclipses in ultra-compact double degenerate binary systems (Anderson et al. 2005), to constrain the properties of fast faint transients (such as optical flashes associated with gamma-ray bursts; Bloom et al. 2008), to detect elec…”
    BackgroundSelf-citation
  • MODULES FOR EXPERIMENTS IN STELLAR ASTROPHYSICS (MESA): BINARIES, PULSATIONS, AND EXPLOSIONS

    Paxton, B., Marchant, P., Schwab, J., Bauer, E. B., Bildsten, L., Cantiello, M., Dessart, L., Farmer, R., Hu, H., Langer, N., et al. (2015) · The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series · doi:10.1088/0067-0049/220/1/15 · Cited by 3,260

    “Building upon the legacy of the Palomar Transient Factory (Law et al. 2009), the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory conducts a fully-automated, wide-field sur- vey that systematically explores the transient sky with a 90 second to 5 day cadence (Vreeswijk et al. 2014).”
    MethodSelf-citation
  • MESA ISOCHRONES AND STELLAR TRACKS (MIST). I. SOLAR-SCALED MODELS

    Choi, J., Dotter, A., Conroy, C., Cantiello, M., Paxton, B., & Johnson, B. D. (2016) · The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.3847/0004-637x/823/2/102 · Cited by 2,922

    “…such as asteroseismology (e.g., CoRoT; Baglin et al. 2006, Kepler; Gilliland et al. 2010), time-domain astronomy (e.g., Palomar Transient Factory; Law et al. 2009, Pan-STARRS; Kaiser et al. 2010), galactic archaeology (e.g., APOGEE; Zasowski et al. 2013, GALAH; De Silva et al. 2015), and…”
    Background
  • THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH DATA RELEASES OF THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY: FINAL DATA FROM SDSS-III

    Alam, S., Albareti, F. D., Prieto, C. A., Anders, F., Anderson, S. F., Anderton, T., Andrews, B. H., Armengaud, E., Aubourg, É., Bailey, S., et al. (2015) · The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series · doi:10.1088/0067-0049/219/1/12 · Cited by 2,491

    “The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF; Law et al. 2009) is performing a narrow-band survey in two filters, centered at 656 nm and 663 nm, to complete the catalog of galaxies in the local universe out to 200 Mpc.”
    Background

See all 1,141

Metadata

Authors
Law, N. M., Kulkarni, S. R., Dekany, R. G., Ofek, E. O., Quimby, R. M., Nugent, P. E., Surace, J., Grillmair, C. C., Bloom, J. S., Kasliwal, M. M., Bildsten, L., Brown, T., Cenko, S. B., Ciardi, D., Croner, E., Djorgovski, S. G., van Eyken, J., Filippenko, A. V., Fox, D. B., Gal-Yam, A., Hale, D., Hamam, N., Helou, G., Henning, J., Howell, D. A., Jacobsen, J., Laher, R., Mattingly, S., McKenna, D., Pickles, A., Poznanski, D., Rahmer, G., Rau, A., Rosing, W., Shara, M., Smith, R., Starr, D., Sullivan, M., Velur, V., Walters, R., & Zolkower, J.
Affiliations
  • California Institute of Technology (US)
  • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)
  • University of California, Berkeley (US)
  • University of California, Santa Barbara (US)
  • Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (US)
  • Pennsylvania State University (US)
  • American Museum of Natural History (US)
  • University of Oxford (GB)
Venue
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Published
2009-12
Volume
121
Issue
886
Pages
1395-1408
ISSN
  • 0004-6280 (ISSN-L)
  • 1538-3873
OpenAlex
W2083217178
Cited by
1,141
References
7
Citations by year
2026: 30 · 2025: 44 · 2024: 50 · 2023: 40 · 2022: 54 · 2021: 61 · 2020: 74 · 2019: 99 · 2018: 92 · 2017: 115 · 2016: 114 · 2015: 76 · 2014: 69 · 2013: 64 · 2012: 65
FWCI
26.68
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • CaltechAUTHORS (California Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion)
  • Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (submittedVersion)
  • Max Planck Digital Library (submittedVersion)
  • MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (0540352, 0607485, 0507734)
  • U.S. Department of Energy (DE‐FG02‐, FC02-06ER41453, FG02-08ER41563)
  • National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NNX08AM04G)
  • Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
  • California Institute of Technology
  • University of Oxford
  • Minerva Foundation
  • Weizmann Institute of Science
  • Israel Science Foundation
  • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae
  • Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Instrumentation › Astronomy and Astrophysical Research
  • Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
Keywords
Palomar Transient Factory, optical transients, supernova search, transient survey, light curves, transient classification, H-alpha survey, eclipsing binaries, transiting exoplanets, Orion

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