The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is performing a three-day cadence survey of the visible northern sky (~3{pi}) with newly found transient candidates announced via public alerts. The ZTF Bright Transient Survey (BTS) is a large spectroscopic campaign to complement the photometric survey. BTS endeavors to spectroscopically classify all extragalactic transients with m_peak_<~18.5mag in either the g_ZTF_ or r_ZTF_ filters, and publicly announce said classifications. BTS discoveries are predominantly supernovae (SNe), making this the largest flux-limited SN survey to date. Here we present a catalog of 761 SNe, classified during the first nine months of ZTF (2018 April 1-2018 December 31). We report BTS SN redshifts from SN template matching and spectroscopic host-galaxy redshifts when available. We analyze the redshift completeness of local galaxy catalogs, the redshift completeness fraction (RCF; the ratio of SN host galaxies with known spectroscopic redshift prior to SN discovery to the total number of SN hosts). Of the 512 host galaxies with SNe Ia, 227 had previously known spectroscopic redshifts, yielding an RCF estimate of 44%{+/-}4%. The RCF decreases with increasing distance and decreasing galaxy luminosity (for z<0.05, or ~200Mpc, RCF~0.6). Prospects for dramatically increasing the RCF are limited to new multifiber spectroscopic instruments or wide-field narrowband surveys. Existing galaxy redshift catalogs are only ~50% complete at r~16.9mag. Pushing this limit several magnitudes deeper will pay huge dividends when searching for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave events or sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays or neutrinos.
ZZ Ceti white dwarfs and candidates in Gaia survey
Short Name:
J/AJ/160/252
Date:
09 Mar 2022 22:00:00
Publisher:
CDS
Description:
The Gaia satellite recently released parallax measurements for ~260000 high-confidence white dwarf candidates, allowing for precise measurements of their physical parameters. By combining these parallaxes with Pan-STARRS and u-band photometry, we measured the effective temperature and stellar mass for all white dwarfs in the Northern Hemisphere within 100pc of the Sun, and identified a sample of ZZ-Ceti white dwarf candidates within the so-called instability strip. We acquired high-speed photometric observations for 90 candidates using the PESTO camera attached to the 1.6m telescope at the Mont-Megantic Observatory. We report the discovery of 38 new ZZ-Ceti stars, including two very rare ultramassive pulsators. We also identified five possibly variable stars within the strip, in addition to 47 objects that do not appear to show any photometric variability. However, several of those could be variable with an amplitude below our detection threshold, or could be located outside the instability strip due to errors in their photometric parameters. In the light of our results, we explore the trends of the dominant period and amplitude in the M--Teff plane, and briefly discuss the question of the purity of the ZZ-Ceti instability strip (i.e., a region devoid of non-variable stars).