Berkeley Supernova Ia Program – I. Observations, data reduction and spectroscopic sample of 582 low-redshift Type Ia supernovae

By J. Silverman, R. Foley, A. Filippenko, M. Ganeshalingam, A. Barth, Ryan Chornock, C. Griffith, Jason J. Kong, N. Lee, D. Leonard and 30 more. 2012

276 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this first paper in a series, we present 1298 low-redshift (z ≲ 0.2) optical spectra of 582 Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) observed from 1989 to 2008 as part of the Berkeley Supernova Ia Program (BSNIP). 584 spectra of 199 SNe Ia have well-calibrated light curves with measured distance moduli, and many of the spectra have been corrected for host-galaxy contamination. Most of the data were obtained using the Kast double spectrograph mounted on the Shane 3 m telescope at Lick Observatory and have a typical wavelength range of 3300–10 400 A, roughly twice as wide as spectra from most previously published data sets. We present our observing and reduction procedures, and we describe the resulting SN Database, which will be an online, public, searchable data base containing all of our fully reduced spectra and companion photometry. In addition, we discuss our spectral classification scheme (using the SuperNova IDentification code, snid; Blondin & Tonry), utilizing our newly constructed set of snid spectral templates. These templates allow us to accurately classify our entire data set, and by doing so we are able to reclassify a handful of objects as bona fide SNe Ia and a few other objects as members of some of the peculiar SN Ia subtypes. In fact, our data set includes spectra of nearly 90 spectroscopically peculiar SNe Ia. We also present spectroscopic host-galaxy redshifts of some SNe Ia where these values were previously unknown. The sheer size of the BSNIP data set and the consistency of our observation and reduction methods make this sample unique among all other published SN Ia data sets and complementary in many ways to the large, low-redshift SN Ia spectra presented by Matheson et al. and Blondin et al. In other BSNIP papers in this series, we use these data to examine the relationships between spectroscopic characteristics and various observables such as photometric and host-galaxy properties.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b09a9fea1dfce987103f52827d918e53d970c948

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Filippenko
2. A. Riess
3. N. Smith
4. S. Smartt
5. R. Kirshner
6. E. Berger
7. S. Jha
8. Ryan Chornock

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. N. Smith
2. S. Smartt
3. R. Kirshner
4. E. Berger
5. A. Filippenko
6. S. Jha
7. A. Gal-yam
8. A. Riess

Citations in the corpus

• TYPE Iax SUPERNOVAE: A NEW CLASS OF STELLAR EXPLOSION (2012, methodology): “Finally, while analyzing the large BSNIP sample of SN Ia spectra, Silverman et al. (2012) determined that SN 2002bp was similar to SN 2008ha, another member of this class.”
• The Unprecedented Third Outburst of SN 2009ip: A Luminous Blue Variable Becomes a Supernova (2012, methodology): “The data reduction for these observations followed standard techniques as described previously by Silverman et al. (2012).”
• COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS FROM MEASUREMENTS OF TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE DISCOVERED DURING THE FIRST 1.5 yr OF THE Pan-STARRS1 SURVEY (2013, methodology): “…by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA) under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation (NSF). standards (Wade & Horne 1988; Foley et al. 2003, 2009a; Silverman et al. 2012a).”
• TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE STRONGLY INTERACTING WITH THEIR CIRCUMSTELLAR MEDIUM (2013, methodology): “To identify SNe Ia-CSM, we created a special set of spectral templates that consisted of all 310 spectra of 163 objects classified as SNe IIn from the Berkeley SN Group’s database (Silverman et al. 2012a).”
• Improved cosmological constraints from a joint analysis of the SDSS-II and SNLS supernova samples (2014, background): “…5 year SNLS sample; extended samples from several low-z experiments (Stritzinger et al. 2011; Hicken et al. 2012); and numerous spectral data samples (Blondin et al. 2012; Silverman et al. 2012; Maguire et al. 2012; Pereira et al. 2013), which should provide better constraints on the SNe Ia model.”
• A Comprehensive Measurement of the Local Value of the Hubble Constant with 1 km s−1 Mpc−1 Uncertainty from the Hubble Space Telescope and the SH0ES Team (2021, methodology): “We obtain spectra directly from the Open Supernova Catalog25 (OSC; Guillochon et al. 2017), which aggregates data from numerous sources (including notable low-redshift SN Ia spectroscopy releases; e.g., Silverman et al. 2012; Blondin et al. 2012; Folatelli et al. 2013; Stahl et al. 2020b).”