Abstract
The Foundation Supernova Survey aims to provide a large, high-fidelity, homogeneous, and precisely calibrated low-redshift Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) sample for cosmology. The calibration of the current low-redshift SN sample is the largest component of systematic uncertainties for SN cosmology, and new data are necessary to make progress. We present the motivation, survey design, observation strategy, implementation, and first results for the Foundation Supernova Survey. We are using the Pan-STARRS telescope to obtain photometry for up to 800 SNe Ia at z>~0.1. This strategy has several unique advantages: (1) the Pan-STARRS system is a superbly calibrated telescopic system, (2) Pan-STARRS has observed 3/4 of the sky in grizyP1 making future template observations unnecessary, (3) we have a well-tested data-reduction pipeline, and (4) we have observed ~3000 high-redshift SNe Ia on this system. Here, we present our initial sample of 225 SN Ia grizP1 light curves, of which 180 pass all criteria for inclusion in a cosmological sample. The Foundation Supernova Survey already contains more cosmologically useful SNe Ia than all other published low-redshift SN Ia samples combined. We expect that the systematic uncertainties for the Foundation Supernova Sample will be two to three times smaller than other low-redshift samples.We find that our cosmologically useful sample has an intrinsic scatter of 0.111 mag, smaller than other low-redshift samples. We perform detailed simulations showing that simply replacing the current low-redshift SN Ia sample with an equally sized Foundation sample will improve the precision on the dark energy equation-of-state parameter by 35 per cent, and the dark energy figure of merit by 72 per cent.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | stx3136 |
| Pages (from-to) | 193-219 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society |
| Volume | 475 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 21 2018 |
Funding
This manuscript is based upon work supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Contract No. NNG16PJ34C issued through the WFIRST Science Investigation Teams Programme. RJF and DS were supported in part by NASA grant 14-WPS14-0048. The UCSC group is supported in part by NSF grant AST-1518052, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, and from fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to RJF. DS acknowledges support from NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51383.001 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555 and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago through grant NSF PHY-1125897 and an endowment from the Kavli Foundation and its founder Fred Kavli. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant agreement no. [291222] (PI: SJS). Some of the data presented herein 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 Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. This paper is based on observations (NOAO Prop. IDs: 2015A-0253 and 2015B-0313; PI: RJF) obtained at the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope, which is a joint project of the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, e Inovac¸ão (MCTI) da República Federativa do Brasil; the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO); the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC); and Michigan State University (MSU), and at Kitt Peak National Observatory, NOAO, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The authors are honoured to be permitted to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham. Pan-STARRS is supported in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grants NNX12AT65G and NNX14AM74G. The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen’s University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation Grant No. AST–1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Research at Lick Observatory is partially supported by a generous gift from Google.
Keywords
- Cosmology: observations
- Dark energy
- Distance scale
- Supernovae: general
- Surveys
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Space and Planetary Science