Northwestern Events Calendar

May
25
2018

Brad Cenko: The Zwicky Transient Facility

When: Friday, May 25, 2018
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM CT

Where: Technological Institute, L211, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Yassaman   (847) 491-7650

Group: Physics and Astronomy Colloquia

Category: Academic

Description:

Title: The Zwicky Transient Facility

Speaker:Brad Cenko, NASA

Abstract: Thanks in large part to Moore’s Law (applied both to Si-based CCD detectors and computational/storage capabilities), it has recently become possible to conduct sensitive optical imaging over large areas of the sky with a regular cadence. This “celestial cinematography” has revolutionized our picture of the transient and variable sky, with implications ranging from cosmology to the end fate of massive stars. In this talk I’ll describe the next great leap forward in wide-field optical imaging, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). A custom-built camera provides a 47 square degree field-of-view on the Palomar 48 inch Oschin Schmidt telescope, yielding more than an order of magnitude improvement in survey speed relative to its predecessor survey, the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF). ZTF achieved first light in October 2017, and I will provide an update on the project status and some early science results.

Host: Margutti

Speaker Schedule

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, colloquium

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