The ESSENCE Supernova Survey: Survey Optimization, Observations, and Supernova Photometry

By G. Miknaitis, G. Pignata, Armin Rest, W. M. Wood-Vasey, S. Blondin, P. Challis, R. Smith, C. Stubbs, N. Suntzeff, R. Foley and 26 more. 2007

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We describe the implementation and optimization of the ESSENCE supernova survey, which we have undertaken to measure the dark energy equation-of-state parameter, w = P/(ρc2). We present a method for optimizing the survey exposure times and cadence to maximize our sensitivity to w for a given fixed amount of telescope time. For our survey on the CTIO 4 m telescope, measuring the luminosity distances and redshifts for supernovae at modest redshifts (z ≈ 0.5 ± 0.2) is optimal for determining w. We describe the data analysis pipeline based on using reliable and robust image subtraction to find supernovae automatically and in nearly real time. Since making cosmological inferences with supernovae relies crucially on accurate measurement of their apparent brightnesses, we describe our efforts to establish a thorough calibration of the CTIO 4 m telescope's natural photometric system. In its first four years, ESSENCE has discovered and spectroscopically confirmed 102 Type Ia supernovae, at redshifts from 0.10 to 0.78, identified through an impartial, effective methodology for spectroscopic classification and redshift determination. We present the resulting light curves for all of the Type Ia supernovae found by ESSENCE and used in our measurement of w, presented in a companion paper by Wood-Vasey and coworkers.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/40e15aaf9a586206ff98295eeb691ade84d114c5

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Citations in the corpus

SNLS3: CONSTRAINTS ON DARK ENERGY COMBINING THE SUPERNOVA LEGACY SURVEY THREE-YEAR DATA WITH OTHER PROBES (2011, background): “When combined together, recent SN Ia samples (Astier et al. 2006; Riess et al. 2007; Miknaitis et al. 2007; Holtzman et al. 2008; Hicken et al. 2009a; Contreras et al. 2010) provide measures of dark energy generally consistent with a cosmological constant of w = −1 with statistical uncertainties in…”
TOWARD CHARACTERIZATION OF THE TYPE IIP SUPERNOVA PROGENITOR POPULATION: A STATISTICAL SAMPLE OF LIGHT CURVES FROM Pan-STARRS1 (2014, methodology): “…the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences “Odyssey” Research Computing cluster, where they are processed through a frame subtraction analysis using the photpipe image differencing pipeline developed for the SuperMACHO and ESSENCE surveys (Rest et al. 2005; Miknaitis et al. 2007; Rest et al. 2013).”
GALAXY CLUSTERS DISCOVERED VIA THE SUNYAEV–ZEL’DOVICH EFFECT IN THE FIRST 720 SQUARE DEGREES OF THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE SURVEY (2012, methodology): “Optical/NIR Imaging Data Reduction and Redshift Determination All optical images are processed using the PHOTPIPE analysis pipeline (Rest et al. 2005; Miknaitis et al. 2007), as was done in previous SPT optical follow up analyses (High et al. 2010; Williamson et al. 2011; Story et al. 2011).”
Improved constraints on dark energy from Chandra X-ray observations of the largest relaxed galaxy clusters (2007, methodology): “In the first case, we use the compilation of Davis et al. (2007) which includes results from the ESSENCE survey (60 targets; Wood-Vasey et al. 2007, Miknaitis et al. 2007), the SNLS first year data (57 targets; Astier et al. 2006), 45 nearby supernovae (Jha et al. 2007) and the 30 high-redshift…”
CfA3: 185 TYPE Ia SUPERNOVA LIGHT CURVES FROM THE CfA (2009, methodology): “The convolution kernel is calculated using the algorithm of Alard & Lupton (1998) and Alard (2000) with slight improvements as in Becker et al. (2004) and Miknaitis et al. (2007).”
COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS FROM MEASUREMENTS OF TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE DISCOVERED DURING THE FIRST 1.5 yr OF THE Pan-STARRS1 SURVEY (2013, methodology): “There have been three main surveys probing the higher redshift range, ESSENCE (Miknaitis et al. 2007; WoodVasey et al. 2007), SNLS (Conley et al. 2011; Sullivan et al. 2011), and SDSS (Frieman et al. 2008; Kessler et al. 2009a).”
Determining the Type, Redshift, and Age of a Supernova Spectrum (2006, methodology): “To compare the supernova age determined through cross-correlation with external measurements, we select ESSENCE high-redshift SN Ia spectra for which a well-sampled light curve is available around maximum light (Miknaitis et al. 2007).”
COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS FROM THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY MaxBCG CLUSTER CATALOG (2009, methodology): “A joint WMAP5+SN analysis, which draws on the Union combined dataset (Kowalski et al. 2008), a compilation of Super Nova (SN) data composed of the Riess et al. (2004, gold sample only), Astier et al. (2006), and Miknaitis et al. (2007) supernova samples.”
Type Ia Supernovae Are Good Standard Candles in the Near Infrared: Evidence from PAIRITEL (2007, methodology): “Two current projects, ESSENCE (Equation of State: SupErNovae trace Cosmic Expansion; Miknaitis et al. 2007; Wood-Vasey et al. 2007) and SNLS (Supernova Legacy Survey; Astier et al. 2006) seek to constrain the nature of the dark energy responsible for cosmic acceleration by measuring the…”
Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe (2008, unknown): “…surveys, the SNLS (Supernova Legacy Survey) (Astier et al. 2006) and the ESSENCE (Equation of State: Supernovae Trace Cosmic Expansion) survey (Miknaitis et al. 2007), have been using 4-m telescopes to measure light curves for several hundred SNe Ia over the redshift range z ∼ 0.3 − 0.9 with…”
Cosmological parameter constraints from SDSS luminous red galaxies: a new treatment of large-scale clustering (2009, background): “…the recent samples from the SuperNova Legacy Survey (SNLS; Astier et al. 2006) and the Equation of State SupErNovae trace Cosmic Expansion (ESSENCE; Miknaitis et al. 2007), the high-redshift sample from the Hubble Space Telescope (Riess et al. 2004; Riess et al. 2007) as well as older data sets…”
HYDROGEN-POOR SUPERLUMINOUS SUPERNOVAE AND LONG-DURATION GAMMA-RAY BURSTS HAVE SIMILAR HOST GALAXIES (2013, methodology): “…nightly MDS stacks are transferred to the Harvard FAS Research Computing cluster, where they are processed through a frame subtraction analysis using the photpipe pipeline developed for the SuperMACHO and ESSENCE surveys (Rest et al. 2005; Garg et al. 2007; Miknaitis et al. 2007; Rest et al. 2013).”
The Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey (2014, background): “At higher redshift, new surveys included ESSENCE (Miknaitis et al. 2007), the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS; Astier et al. 2006), and dedicated HST observations by Riess et al. (2007).”
Scrutinizing Exotic Cosmological Models Using ESSENCE Supernova Data Combined with Other Cosmological Probes (2007, methodology): “The ESSENCE (“Equation of State: SupErNovae trace Cosmic Expansion”) supernova survey is an ongoing project that aims to measure the equation-of-state parameter of dark energy to better than 10% (Krisciunas et al. 2005; Sollerman et al. 2007; Miknaitis et al. 2007).”
FIRST-YEAR SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY-II SUPERNOVA RESULTS: HUBBLE DIAGRAM AND COSMOLOGICAL PARAMETERS (2009, background): “…selected samples of SNe Ia with relatively dense time-sampling in multiple passbands at redshifts z & 0.3, most recently from the ESSENCE project (Miknaitis et al. 2007; Wood-Vasey et al. 2007) and Supernova Legacy (SNLS) Survey (Astier et al. 2006), augmented by smaller samples from the Hubble…”