CATS150 aims to systematically classify all transients from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) alert stream that coincide with a galaxy in the Jan 2025 version of the NED-LVS catalog (Cook et al. 2023) within 150 Mpc. The survey will leverage the enhanced efficiency of the Next Generation Palomar Spectrograph (NGPS; 2024TNSAN.340....1K) on the Palomar 200-inch Hale telescope to achieve at least 95% spectroscopic completeness for transients with peak magnitude brighter than 20 mag.
This effort aims to constrain the faint end of the core-collapse supernova luminosity function and identify rare, subluminous transients, including SN precursors, ultra-stripped supernovae, stripped-envelope supernovae with very low nickel yield, electron-capture supernova candidates, stellar merger candidates, intermediate luminosity red transients, among others.
CATS150 is specifically designed as a precursor to the LSST era, anticipating an increased discovery rate of faint transients.
All sources discovered and classified as part of CATS150 will be immediately made public on TNS. We encourage additional follow-up and classification of all transients discovered through this experiment, which will be maintained on the following webpage: https://cats150.caltech.edu/
Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48-inch and the 60-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under Award #2407588 and a partnership including Caltech, USA; Caltech/IPAC, USA; University of Maryland, USA; University of California, Berkeley, USA; University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, USA; Cornell University, USA; Drexel University, USA; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA; Institute of Science and Technology, Austria; National Central University, Taiwan; Operations are conducted by Caltech's Optical Observatory (COO) and Caltech/IPAC.
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