ZARTH App

August 3, 2023

A team of researchers from Center for Data Driven Discovery, California Institute of Technology, has developed an app that allows anyone with a smartphone to ‘hunt’ for transients.
- Students from the Indian Institutes of Technology at Mandi and Gandhinagar were also involved in developing ZARTH.

Transients refer to astronomical phenomena with durations of fractions of a second to weeks or years.

Typically they are extreme, short-lived events associated with the total or partial destruction of an astrophysical object.

The new app, called ZARTH, short for ‘ZTF Augmented Reality Transient Hunter’, is built along the lines of the augmented reality mobile game Pokemon Go.
It allows the user to do serious science while playing a game.
The app uses the open-source Sky Map and adds data daily from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)’s robotic telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California.
The ZTF scans the entire northern sky every two days and uses the data to make large area sky maps that have important applications in tracking near-earth asteroids and studying supernovae.
Tracking down transients on ZARTH is easy: the app is loaded daily with 200 transients detected in real-time by the ZTF, an incredible 100,000 every night.
- These include supernovae, flaring stars (variable stars that flare up for a short while), white dwarf binaries (burnt remains of dead stars that orbit one another and often merge and explode in supernovae), active galactic nuclei, and several other types.
ZARTH ranks transients by their rarity and importance, and players can compete with each other to score points and earn daily credits.