🌌 ZTF in the Wild

The honest view of ZTF. 26,534 sources sampled at random from the matchfiles — no variability cut, no labels; exactly the encoder's pretraining diet — mapped jointly with the curated set (grey ghost). Most random ZTF sources are quiet; the curated islands are the rare, strongly-variable tail. Gold stars: 18 ultracompact binaries injected through the same pipeline — ZTF J1539+5027 (6.9-min double white dwarf, Burdge+ 2019 Nature), the 51-min accreting binary J1813+4251, the 62-min black widow J1406+1222, and J1239+8347, the 57-min mass-transferring (accreting) brown dwarf (Whitebook, Householder et al. 2026). Tap one to see where the encoder put it, its nearest-neighbour classes, and its folded light curve.