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Register a new userAsteroid rotation periods from the Palomar Transient Factory survey
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The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a synoptic survey designed to explore the transient and variable sky in a wide variety of cadences. We use PTF observations of fields that were observed multiple times (>=10) per night, for several nights, to find asteroids, construct their lightcurves and measure their rotation periods. Here we describe the pipeline we use to achieve these goals and present the results from the first four (overlapping) PTF fields analyzed as part of this program. These fields, which cover an area of 21 deg^2, were observed on four nights with a cadence of ~20 min. Our pipeline was able to detect 624 asteroids, of which 145 (~20%) were previously unknown. We present high quality rotation periods for 88 main-belt asteroids and possible period or lower limit on the period for an additional 85 asteroids. For the remaining 451 asteroids, we present lower limits on their photometric amplitudes. Three of the asteroids have lightcurves that are characteristic of binary asteroids. We estimate that implementing our search for all existing high-cadence PTF data will provide rotation periods for about 10,000 asteroids mainly in the magnitude range ~14 to ~20.
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A new asteroid rotation period survey have been carried out by using the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF). Twelve consecutive PTF fields, which covered an area of 87 deg$^2$ in the ecliptic plane, were observed in $R$ band with a cadence of $sim$20 min during February 15--18, 2013. We detected 2500 known asteroids with a diameter range of 0.5 km $leq D leq$ 200 km. Of these, 313 objects had highly reliable rotation periods and exhibited the spin barrier at $sim2$ hours. In contrast to the flat spin rate distribution of the asteroids with 3 km $leq D leq$ 15 km shown by Pravec et al. (2008), our results deviated somewhat from a Maxwellian distribution and showed a decrease at the spin rate greater than 5 rev/day. One super-fast-rotator candidate and two possible binary asteroids were also found in this work.
Two dedicated asteroid rotation-period surveys have been carried out using data taken on January 6-9 and February 20-23 of 2014 by the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) in the $R$~band with $sim 20$-min cadence. The total survey area covered 174~deg$^2$ in the ecliptic plane. Reliable rotation periods for 1,438 asteroids are obtained from a larger data set of 6,551 mostly main-belt asteroids, each with $geq 10$~detections. Analysis of 1751, PTF based, reliable rotation periods clearly shows the spin barrier at $sim 2$~hours for rubble-pile asteroids. We also found a new large-sized super-fast rotator, 2005 UW163 (Chang et al., 2014), and other five candidates as well. Our spin-rate distributions of asteroids with $3 < D < 15$~km shows number decrease when frequency greater than 5 rev/day, which is consistent to that of the Asteroid Light Curve Database (LCDB, Warner et al., 2009) and the result of (Masiero et al., 2009). We found the discrepancy in the spin-rate distribution between our result and (Pravec et al., 2008, update 2014-04-20) is mainly from asteroids with $Delta m < 0.2$ mag that might be primarily due to different survey strategies. For asteroids with $D leq 3$~km, we found a significant number drop at $f = 6$ rev/day. The YORP effect timescale for small-sized asteroid is shorter that makes more elongate objets spun up to reach their spin-rate limit and results in break-up. The K-S test suggests a possible difference in the spin-rate distributions of C- and S-type asteroids. We also find that C-type asteroids have a smaller spin-rate limit than the S-type, which agrees with the general sense that the C-type has lower bulk density than the S-type.
We present results of the Sky2Night project: a systematic, unbiased search for fast optical transients with the Palomar Transient Factory. We have observed 407 deg$^2$ in $R$-band for 8 nights at a cadence of 2 hours. During the entire duration of the project, the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope on La Palma was dedicated to obtaining identification spectra for the detected transients. During the search, we found 12 supernovae, 10 outbursting cataclysmic variables, 9 flaring M-stars, 3 flaring active Galactic nuclei and no extragalactic fast optical transients. Using this systematic survey for transients, we have calculated robust observed rates for the detected types of transients, and upper limits of the rate of extragalactic fast optical transients of $mathcal{R}<37times 10^{-4}$deg$^{-2}$d$^{-1}$ and $mathcal{R}<9.3times 10^{-4}$deg$^{-2}$d$^{-1}$ for timescales of 4h and 1d and a limiting magnitude of $Rapprox19.7$. We use the results of this project to determine what kind of and how many astrophysical false positives we can expect when following up gravitational wave detections in search for kilonovae.
Type Ic supernovae represent the explosions of the most stripped massive stars, but their progenitors and explosion mechanisms remain unclear. Larger samples of observed supernovae can help characterize the population of these transients. We present an analysis of 44 spectroscopically normal Type Ic supernovae, with focus on the light curves. The photometric data were obtained over 7 years with the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) and its continuation, the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF). This is the first homogeneous and large sample of SNe Ic from an untargeted survey, and we aim to estimate explosion parameters for the sample. We present K-corrected Bgriz light curves of these SNe, obtained through photometry on template-subtracted images. We performed an analysis on the shape of the $r$-band light curves and confirmed the correlation between the rise parameter Delta m_{-10} and the decline parameter Delta m_{15}. Peak r-band absolute magnitudes have an average of -17.71 +- 0.85 mag. To derive the explosion epochs, we fit the r-band lightcurves to a template derived from a well-sampled light curve. We computed the bolometric light curves using r and g band data, g-r colors and bolometric corrections. Bolometric light curves and Fe II lambda 5169 velocities at peak were used to fit to the Arnett semianalytic model in order to estimate the ejecta mass M_{ej}, the explosion energy E_{K} and the mass of radioactive nickel (M(56) Ni) for each SN. Including 41 SNe, we find average values of <M_{ej}>=4.50 +-0.79 msun, <E_{K}>=1.79 +- 0.29 x10^{51} erg, and <M(56)Ni)>= 0.19 +- 0.03 msun. The explosion-parameter distributions are comparable to those available in the literature, but our large sample also includes some transients with narrow and very broad light curves leading to more extreme ejecta masses values.
We construct a photometrically calibrated catalog of non-variable sources from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) observations. The first version of this catalog presented here, the PTF photometric catalog 1.0, contains calibrated R_PTF-filter magnitudes for about 21 million sources brighter than magnitude 19, over an area of about 11233 deg^2. The magnitudes are provided in the PTF photometric system, and the color of a source is required in order to convert these magnitudes into other magnitude systems. We estimate that the magnitudes in this catalog have typical accuracy of about 0.02 mag with respect to magnitudes from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The median repeatability of our catalogs magnitudes for stars between 15 and 16 mag, is about 0.01 mag, and it is better than 0.03 mag for 95% of the sources in this magnitude range. The main goal of this catalog is to provide reference magnitudes for photometric calibration of visible light observations. Subseque
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