Project News

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

ZTF counts more than 10,000 supernovae

ZTF • News Release • December 4th, 2024

In its 7 years of operations, the Zwicky Transient Facility has revolutionized the discovery and classifications of supernovae contributing more than 70% of all detected and 50 % of all recorded classified supernovae. ZTF's Bright Transient Survey is the largest transient survey in the...

ZTF receives more support from the NSF

ZTF • News Release • October 3rd, 2024

The Zwicky Transient Facility will continue scientific operations for the next two years thanks to additional 1.6M USD support from the National Science Foundation and financial contributions from continuing and new partners. The grant will allow ZTF to work in tandem ...

The aftermath of a supernova seen for the first time

ZTF • News Release • January 10th, 2024

A team of astronomers from the ZTF partnership used ZTF and a suite of other telescopes available to the ZTF partners to discover and analyze supernova SN2022jli. While nothing is uncommon about the name of this supernova, it goes down in history as the first one that revealed to us in...

The weirdest of them all - a stellar corpse shows signs of life

ZTF • News Release • November 15th, 2023

The Zwicky Transient Facility captured repeated energetic flares from a stellar corpse, a phenomena astronomer are observing for the very first time. The research advances longstanding goals to map how stars’ properties in life may predict the way they will die, ...