Surveys

PTF 10fqs: A Luminous Red Nova in the Spiral Galaxy Messier 99

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is systematically charting the optical transient and variable sky. A primary science driver of PTF is building a complete inventory of transients in the local universe (distance less than 200 Mpc). Here, we report …

Rapidly Decaying Supernova 2010X: A Candidate ``.Ia'' Explosion

We present the discovery, photometric, and spectroscopic follow-up observations of SN 2010X (PTF 10bhp). This supernova decays exponentially with τ$_ d $ = 5 days and rivals the current recordholder in speed, SN 2002bj. SN 2010X peaks at M $_ r $ = …

Towards a real-time transient classification engine

Temporal sampling does more than add another axis to the vector of observables. Instead, under the recognition that how objects change (and move) in time speaks directly to the physics underlying astronomical phenomena, next-generation wide-field …

Submillijansky Transients in Archival Radio Observations

We report the results of a 944 epoch survey for transient sources with archival data from the Very Large Array spanning 22 years with a typical epoch separation of 7 days. Observations were obtained at 5 or 8.4 GHz for a single field of view and …