The volumetric rate of normal type Ia supernovae in the local Universe discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory

Creators: Frohmaier, C.; Sullivan, M.; Nugent, P. E.; Smith, M.; Dimitriadis, G.; Bloom, J. S.; Cenko, S. B.; Kasliwal, M. M.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Maguire, K.; Ofek, E. O.; Poznanski, D.; Quimby, R. M.

Abstract

We present the volumetric rate of normal type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF). Using strict data-quality cuts, and considering only periods when the PTF maintained a regular cadence, PTF discovered 90 SNe Ia at z ≤ 0.09 in a well-controlled sample over three years of operation (2010–2012). We use this to calculate the volumetric rate of SN Ia events by comparing this sample to simulations of hundreds of millions of SN Ia light curves produced in statistically representative realizations of the PTF survey. This quantifies the recovery efficiency of each PTF SN Ia event, and thus the relative weighting of each event. From this, the volumetric SN Ia rate was found to be r_v = 2.43 ± 0.29(stat)^(+0.33)_(−0.19)(sys) × 10^(−5) SNe yr^(−1) Mpc^(−3) h^3_(70)⁠. This represents the most precise local measurement of the SN Ia rate. We fit a simple SN Ia delay-time distribution model, ∝ t^(−β), to our PTF rate measurement combined with a literature sample of rate measurements from surveys at higher redshifts. We find β ∼ 1, consistent with a progenitor channel governed by the gravitational inspiral of binary white dwarfs.

Additional Information

© 2019 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) Accepted 2019 March 13. Received 2019 March 13; in original form 2018 December 7. We thank the anonymous referee for their useful comments. We acknowledge support from EU/FP7 ERC grant number 615929. We acknowledge the use of the IRIDIS High Performance Computing Facility, and associated support services, at the University of Southampton. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. Observations were obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope and the 60-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Palomar Transient Factory project, a scientific collaboration between the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Las Cumbres Observatory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the University of Oxford, and the Weizmann Institute of Science.

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