About ZARTH

Learn how the idea was born, who created ZARTH and why

Why we created ZARTH

Look up to the night sky. Now, do it tomorrow, and the day after...not much is changing, right? This often creates the illusion that the universe is static, slow, unchanging but this couldn't be further from the truth! A lifetime is a ridiculously short time when we talk about the universe and our eyes are also a very limited sensor with which to explore the cosmos. But combine our knowledge of physics with our capability to build much more sensitive telescopes and the universe is releaved to us like never before. It's a dynamic place busting with activity. Stars, planets, asteroids, black holes, comets and even dark matter are constantly moving, spinning, colliding, dying...

Unlike most apps out there, we want to show you this dynamic and transient cosmos. To do so, we designed ZARTH, or the ZTF Augmented Reality Transient Hunter app. With ZARTH, we want you to go out there and "catch" transient cosmic events that may appear one day and disappear soon after, very similar to what real astronomers do.

Aurore Simonnet/Press Image for Kara et al., 2016

A star is being consumed by a nearby supermassive black hole. Astronomers call this a tidal disruption event (TDE). Image credit: Carl Knox (OzGrav, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, Swinburne University of Technology)

How did it all begin?

In 2016, the augmented reality game Pokemon GO was launched. While playing the game, Ashish Mahabal, an astronomer and lead computational scientist at Caltech noticed the similarities between the Pokemon families and optical transients. He was inspired and created a prototype game in which players had to "catch" transients instead of fantastic creatures such as pokemon. The prototype has evolved ever since with the help of many people and has now been released as a mobile app game for astronomy outreach. ZARTH, or ZTF Augmented Reality Transient Hunter uses the open source Sky Map and adds another layer to it that represents real astronomical transients selected daily from the Zwicky Transient Facililty survey. Players can "catch" these transients, learn more about them and earn points for it (think of it as a cosmic investment market).

Who created ZARTH

A significant fraction of the ZARTH coding has been carried out at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi (IIT-Mandi) in India under the guidance of Dr. Ashish Mahabal (Astronomer and Lead Computational and Data Scientist at Caltech’s Center for Data Driven Discovery), and Prof. Arnav Bhavsar (IIT-Mandi). The initial work was done by Abhijit Manhas with some help from Shrikha and Adithya Solai (also IIT-Mandi students). The majority of the app development has since been done by Dhruv Pindawala, an undergraduate student at IIT-Mandi, India. Anika Arora, an undergraduate student at Caltech conducted a SURF summer research project during the summer of 2022 with Ashish Mahabal and Iva Kostadinova developing the selection and sparsification metrics for ZARTH. Members of the ZTF collaboration and a few others have served as alpha-testers for ZARTH. Finally, Dhyey Thummar from IIT Gandhinagar, India, did a SURF summer research project in 2023 with Ashish Mahabal and Iva Kostadinova at Caltech adding features, taking care of various issues, and in general puting finishing touches.

Ashish Mahabal

Astronomer and Lead Computational Scientist & ZTF Machine Learning Lead (Caltech)

Dhruv Pindawala

Undergraduate & ZARTH Chief Coder (IIT, Mandi)

Anika Arora

Caltech undergrad student

Iva Kostadinova

ZTF Program Coordinator & ZARTH Outreach Expert (Caltech)

Arnav Bhasvar

Professor & Student Mentor (IIT, Mandi)

Dhyey Thummar

Undergraduate student (IIT, Gandhinagar)