Optical Rebrightening of Extragalactic Transients from the Zwicky Transient Facility

Monika Soraisam, Thomas Matheson, Chien-Hsiu Lee, Abhijit Saha, Gautham Narayan, Nicholas Wolf, Adam Scott, Stephanie Figuereo, Rafael Nunuez, Kevin McKinnon, Puragra Guhathakurta, Thomas Brink, Alexei Filippenko, Nathan Smith

Published 2022-01-22Version 1

Ongoing large-scale optical time-domain surveys, such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), are producing alerts at unprecedented rates. Analysis of transient sources has so far followed two distinct paths: archival analysis of data on transient sources at a time when they are no longer observable and real-time analysis at the time when the sources are first detected. The latter is the realm of alert brokers such as the Arizona-NOIRLab Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES). In this paper, we synthesize the two analysis paths and present a first systematic study of archival alert-broker data, focusing on extragalactic transients with multipeaked light curves identified in the ANTARES archive of ZTF alerts. Our analysis yields a sample of 37 such sources, including core-collapse supernovae (with two analogs of iPTF14hls), thermonuclear supernovae interacting with their surrounding circumstellar medium, tidal disruption events, luminous blue variables, and as yet unclassified objects. A large fraction of the identified sources is currently active, warranting allocation of follow-up resources in the immediate future to further constrain their nature and the physical processes at work.