Project News

ZTF spots a ZTF spots a stealthy black hole wandering at the edge of a galaxy

ZTF • News Release • July 28th, 2026

A team of international astronomers, expert hunters of black holes, decided to search for supermassive black holes not only at the center of galaxies where they are typically detected but anywhere in the patch of night sky scanned by the Zwicky Transient Facility. Just three months later, they...

ZTF welcomes a new European partner

ZTF • News Release • April 16th, 2026

A collaboration consisting of the German Center for Astrophysics in Gorlitz, the Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics, Potsdam and the German Electron Synchrotron DESY is officially joining the Zwicky Transient Facility partnership, expanding our scientific collaborative network...

How Two Dim Stars Came Together to Shine Brightly

ZTF • News Release • March 18th, 2026

Brown dwarfs are often labeled as "failed stars" for their inability to sustain nuclear fusion at their cores. A new finding led by researchers at Caltech shows how these dim bulbs can join together to shine brightly. Searching through archival observations captured by the Zwicky Transient...

Babamul Goes Live as the Rubin Alert Stream Opens to the Community

ZTF • News Release • February 25th, 2026

Marking a major milestone, alerts from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have begun flowing to dedicated broker systems that will filter and distribute the Rubin alert stream to the astronomical community worldwide. Babamul—one of Rubin’s selected alert brokers—officially began operations...

Astronomer may have spotted a rare hypothesized merger

ZTF • News Release • December 16th, 2025

In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers led by ZTF's principal investigator Mansi Kasliwal describe an oddball cosmic event known superkilonova, or a kilonova spurred by a supernova. Such an event has been hypothesized but never seen. Stiching...

Astronomers see gravitationally lensed superluminous supernovae for the first time

ZTF • News Release • December 12th, 2025

In late August this year, the Zwicky Transient Facility was routinely scanning the night sky for transient and variable events. Joel Johansson from the Oskar Klein Center at the University of Stockholm was reviewing the data when an interesting explosion caught his attention. Little...

Black Hole Flare is Biggest and Most Distant Seen

ZTF • News Release • November 4th, 2025

The Zwicky Transient Facility stumbled across a spectacular flare which most likely results from a hungry black holes that devoured a massive star. The discovery is published in Nature Astronomy.

Mansi Kasliwal to head Palomar Observatory

ZTF • News Release • October 1st, 2025

Mansi Kasliwal, the ZTF principal investigator and a professor of astronomy at Caltech is stepping into a new role as a director of the historic Palomar observatory. Mansi's professional journey is intimately weaved with...

ZTF catches a never-before-seen flare of a supernova

ZTF • News Release • September 4th, 2025

A large team of astronomers, led by ZTF partners at the Northwestern university stumbled upon a unique explosion of a supernova from a massive star back in Sept 2021. After extensive analysis of the supernova using data from multiple telescopes around the world, the astronomers...

ZTF catches an interstellar visitor

ZTF • News Release • July 11th, 2025