Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published December 11, 2007 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Supernovae in the Subaru Deep Field: an initial sample and Type Ia rate out to redshift 1.6

Abstract

Large samples of high-redshift supernovae (SNe) are potentially powerful probes of cosmic star formation, metal enrichment and SN physics. We present initial results from a new deep SN survey, based on re-imaging in the R, i', z' bands, of the 0.25 deg^2 Subaru Deep Field (SDF), with the 8.2-m Subaru telescope and Suprime-Cam. In a single new epoch consisting of two nights of observations, we have discovered 33 candidate SNe, down to a z'-band magnitude of 26.3 (AB). We have measured the photometric redshifts of the SN host galaxies, obtained Keck spectroscopic redshifts for 17 of the host galaxies and classified the SNe using the Bayesian photometric algorithm of Poznanski et al. that relies on template matching. After correcting for biases in the classification, 55 per cent of our sample consists of Type Ia SNe and 45 per cent of core-collapse SNe. The redshift distribution of the SNe Ia reaches z ≈ 1.6, with a median of z ≈ 1.2. The core-collapse SNe reach z ≈ 1.0, with a median of z ≈ 0.5. Our SN sample is comparable to the Hubble Space Telescope/Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) sample in both size and redshift range. The redshift distributions of the SNe in the SDF and in GOODS are consistent, but there is a trend (which requires confirmation using a larger sample) for more high-z SNe Ia in the SDF. This trend is also apparent when comparing the SN Ia rates we derive to those based on GOODS data. Our results suggest a fairly constant rate at high redshift that could be tracking the star formation rate. Additional epochs on this field, already being obtained, will enlarge our SN sample to the hundreds, and determine whether or not there is a decline in the SN Ia rate at z ≳ 1.

Additional Information

© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 RAS. Accepted 2007 September 5. Received 2007 September 4; in original form 2007 July 3. We thank Nobuo Arimoto for his contribution to this project. We are also grateful to R. Feldmann, C. M. Carrollo and P. Oesch for kindly providing us with the ZEBRA code, and for assisting us in its use. We wish to thank A. G. Riess, E. O. Ofek, J. D. Neill and M. Way for helpful discussions and comments. This work was based on data collected at the Subaru Telescope, which is operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and on observations collected at the KPNO, NOAO, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. Additional data presented here were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; the Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. We are grateful for support by the International Institute for Experimental Astrophysics at Tel Aviv University. AVF's SN group at U.C. Berkeley is supported by US National Science Foundation grant AST-0607485, as well as by NASA/HST grant GO-10493 from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY–0551164.

Attached Files

Published - POZmnras07.pdf

Supplemental Material - sm001.ps

Supplemental Material - sm002.ps

Files

POZmnras07.pdf
Files (2.3 MB)
Name Size Download all
md5:019e82560a01a96d84f19e7b23a1f98e
2.2 MB Preview Download
md5:7acd68f3db9b1d9279203d1d32d6a727
84.5 kB Download
md5:7acd68f3db9b1d9279203d1d32d6a727
84.5 kB Download

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023