THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY-II SUPERNOVA SURVEY: SEARCH ALGORITHM AND FOLLOW-UP OBSERVATIONS

By M. Sako, Bruce A. Bassett, A. Becker, D. Cinabro, F. Dejongh, D. DePoy, B. Dilday, M. Doi, Joshua A. Frieman, P. Garnavich and 40 more. 2007

201 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey has identified a large number of new transient sources in a 300 deg2 region along the celestial equator during its first two seasons of a three-season campaign. Multi-band (ugriz) light curves were measured for most of the sources, which include solar system objects, galactic variable stars, active galactic nuclei, supernovae (SNe), and other astronomical transients. The imaging survey is augmented by an extensive spectroscopic follow-up program to identify SNe, measure their redshifts, and study the physical conditions of the explosions and their environment through spectroscopic diagnostics. During the survey, light curves are rapidly evaluated to provide an initial photometric type of the SNe, and a selected sample of sources are targeted for spectroscopic observations. In the first two seasons, 476 sources were selected for spectroscopic observations, of which 403 were identified as SNe. For the type Ia SNe, the main driver for the survey, our photometric typing and targeting efficiency is 90%. Only 6% of the photometric SN Ia candidates were spectroscopically classified as non-SN Ia instead, and the remaining 4% resulted in low signal-to-noise, unclassified spectra. This paper describes the search algorithm and the software, and the real-time processing of the SDSS imaging data. We also present the details of the supernova candidate selection procedures and strategies for follow-up spectroscopic and imaging observations of the discovered sources.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f629766d379273284b1e701445d024312840bcf

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Citations in the corpus

Results from the Supernova Photometric Classification Challenge (2010, methodology): “This entry used an improved version of the method used to classify objects during the SDSS–II SN Survey (Sako et al. 2008).”
FIRST-YEAR SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY-II SUPERNOVA RESULTS: HUBBLE DIAGRAM AND COSMOLOGICAL PARAMETERS (2009, methodology): “The relative deficit of confirmed SNe at redshifts between 0.15 and 0.25 is due to the finite spectroscopic resources that were available for the Fall 2005 campaign and to the relative priorities given to low- and high-redshift candidates for the different telescopes (Sako et al. 2008).”
The Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey (2014, background): “The candidate selection and spectroscopic identification have been described by Sako et al. (2008).”
QUANTIFYING QUASAR VARIABILITY AS PART OF A GENERAL APPROACH TO CLASSIFYING CONTINUOUSLY VARYING SOURCES (2009, background): “Examples of past and current variability surveys are the Galactic microlensing surveys (e.g., OGLE, Udalski et al. 1997; MOA, Sumi et al. 2003; MACHO, Alcock et al. 2000; EROS, Beaulieu et al. 1995; SuperMACHO, Becker et al. 2005), searches for both local (LOSS; Filippenko et al. 2001) and cosmologi”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, methodology): “At intermediate redshifts (0.1 < z < 0.4), the SDSS-II supernova survey (Frieman et al., 2008; Sako et al., 2008) has discovered and monitored 500 spectroscopically confirmed Type Ia SNe; only the first-year data set (103 SNe) has so far been subjected to a full cosmological analysis (Kessler et…”
Improved cosmological constraints from a joint analysis of the SDSS-II and SNLS supernova samples (2014, methodology): “Details of the SDSS-II SN Survey are given in Frieman et al. (2008) and Sako et al. (2008), and the A22, page 2 of 32 procedures for spectroscopic identification and redshift determinations are described in Zheng et al. (2008).”
THE DIFFERENCE IMAGING PIPELINE FOR THE TRANSIENT SEARCH IN THE DARK ENERGY SURVEY (2015, background): “…large SN Ia samples for measuring cosmological parameters, the earliest rolling searches include the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS: Astier et al. 2006; Perrett et al. 2010), ESSENCE (Miknaitis et al. 2007), and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II (SDSS-II: Frieman et al. 2008; Sako et al. 2008).”
The delay-time distribution of Type Ia supernovae from Sloan II (2012, methodology): “◦5 equatorial region, in the RA range from −60◦ to +60◦ (Frieman et al. 2008; Sako et al. 2008).”
Observational Clues to the Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae (2013, background): “…et al. (2006) for the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) sample of SNe Ia, and more recently by Li et al. (2011b) for the Lick Observatory SN survey (LOSS) sample (Leaman et al. 2011, Li et al. 2011c), , and by Smith et al. (2012) for the SDSS-II SN sample (Frieman et al. 2008, Sako et al. 2008).”
THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY-II: PHOTOMETRY AND SUPERNOVA IA LIGHT CURVES FROM THE 2005 DATA (2008, methodology): “Details of the astrometric and PSF matching are given in an appendix in Sako et al. (2008).”
ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT CURVES OF SUPERNOVAE WITH THE SWIFT ULTRAVIOLET/OPTICAL TELESCOPE (2009, background): “For example, the photons corresponding with the rest-frame uvw1 begins to be redshifted into the optical u′ band (e.g., SDSS-II SN survey; Sako et al. 2008; and LSST) for objects at a redshift of z ∼ 0.4 and the g′ band (e.g., SNLS; Astier et al. 2006) at z ∼ 0.8, where the u′−g′ colors also…”
THE BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY OF SDSS-III (2012, methodology): “In this ancillary program, candidate SN hosts were drawn from a database containing 21,787 potentially variable objects (Sako et al. 2008) determined from the repeat imaging of Stripe 82.”
THE EFFECT OF HOST GALAXIES ON TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE IN THE SDSS-II SUPERNOVA SURVEY (2010, methodology): “The SDSS-II transient database contains many thousands of potential SN candidates, out to z ∼ 0.5, of which ≃500 were spectroscopically confirmed as SNe Ia during the survey period (Sako et al. 2008; Holtzman et al. 2008).”
OBSERVING THE NEXT GALACTIC SUPERNOVA (2013, background): “While we observe many extragalactic supernovae (SNe; e.g., Sako et al. 2008; Drake et al. 2009; Law et al. 2009; Leaman et al. 2011), they are very indirect probes of the SN mechanism.”
OPTICAL DISCOVERY OF PROBABLE STELLAR TIDAL DISRUPTION FLARES (2010, methodology): “Good 4 agreement on the flux in the difference image is obtained for the light curves produced by Holtzman et al. (2008) of supernovae from the SDSS SN Survey (Frieman et al. 2008; Sako et al. 2008) which were detected independently by our pipeline.”