Cosmic Newsflash

ZTF makes first discovery of a rare cosmic 'lunch'

Andreoni, Igor et al.; Physical Review Letters, 2022

Astronomers from the Zwicky Transient Facility collaboration have observed a truly rare cosmic “lunch” - a supermassive black hole devouring a nearby star and releasing powerful jets in the process. Dubbed AT2022cmc, this discovery was made while sieving through ZTF survey data using a novel method designed to alert astronomers for such rare events in near real-time.

1000 supernovae classified automonously by ZTF machine learning tool

Astronomers from the ZTF collaboration have developed a machine learning algorithm that now aids them in the classification of Type Ia supernovae. Dubbed SNIascore, the tool has now autonomously classified 1000 supernovae and reported them to the community for subsequent followup. In the near future, the astronomers are trying to extend SNIascore to include classifications of other supernovae. They are also adapting it to work with other spectroscopic instruments.

Press Release

The circumstellar material around hydrogen-rich supernova progenitors

Bruch, Rachel J. et al.,

Astronomers from the ZTF partnership sieved through the entire Phase I survey (2018-2020) to explore early spectra of core collapse supernovae. These early spectra help to study the circumstellar material (CSM) around the massive progenitor stars. Their findings confirm that elevated mass loss in massive stars prior to SN explosion is common.

Volumetric rates of Luminous Red Novae and Intermediate Luminosity Red Transients with ZTF

Karambelkar, Viraj et al.,

In this paper, the authors use the Census of the Local Universe (CLU) program under the Zwicky Transient Facility project to present a systematic sample of 8 LRNe and 8 ILRTs. CLU is used to spectroscopically classifies ZTF transients associated with nearby galaxies (<150 Mpc). allowing tthe authors to arrive at the first systematic volumentric rates for luminous red novae and intermediate luminosity red transients.

HYPERGAL - an improved supernova classification on the SEDM spectrograph

Lezmy, J. et al.,

Authors present HYPERGAL - a fully chromatic scene modeler that uses archival pre-transient photometric images of the SN environment to generate a hyperspectral model of the host galaxy. HYPERGAL is implemented on the SEDM spectrograph (part of the ZTF transient classification system on Palomar). First results show that HYPERGAL is extremely effective in extracting and classifying SNe in the presence of strong contamination by the host galaxy, providing a significant improvement with respect to the single point-source extraction.