Nearby supernova rates from the Lick Observatory Supernova Search – I. The methods and data base

By J. Leaman, Weidong Li, Ryan Chornock, A. Filippenko. 2010

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This is the first paper of a series in which we present new measurements of the observed rates of supernovae (SNe) in the local Universe, determined from the Lick Observatory Supernova Search. We have obtained 2.3 million observations of 14 882 sample galaxies over an interval of 11 years (1998 March to 2008 December). We considered 1036 SNe detected in our sample and used an optimal subsample of 726 SNe (274 Type Ia SNe, 116 Type Ibc SNe and Type II 324 SNe) to determine our SN rates. This is the largest and most homogeneous set of nearby SNe ever assembled for this purpose, and ours is the first local SN rate analysis based on CCD imaging and modern image-subtraction techniques. In this paper, we lay the foundation of the study. We derive the recipe for the control-time calculation for SNe with a known luminosity function and provide details on the construction of the galaxy and SN samples used in the calculations. Compared with a complete volume-limited galaxy sample, our sample has a deficit of low-luminosity galaxies but still provides enough statistics for a reliable rate calculation. There is a strong Malmquist bias, so the average size (luminosity or mass) of the galaxies increases monotonically with distance, and this trend is used to showcase a correlation between SN rates and galaxy sizes. Very few core-collapse SNe are found in early-type galaxies, providing strong constraints on the amount of recent star formation within these galaxies. The small average observation interval (∼9 d) of our survey ensures that our control-time calculations can tolerate a reasonable amount of uncertainty in the luminosity functions of SNe. We perform Monte Carlo simulations to determine the limiting magnitude of each image and the SN detection efficiency as a function of galaxy Hubble type. The limiting magnitude and the detection efficiency, together with the luminosity function derived from a complete sample of very nearby SNe in Paper II, will be used to calculate the control time and the SN rates in Paper III.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b95174110ab0b6182a3938ce06ae82799b70518b

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Citations in the corpus

OPTICAL DISCOVERY OF PROBABLE STELLAR TIDAL DISRUPTION FLARES (2010, background): “8 in (Leaman et al. 2010), so the 1.6% geometrical penalty for the SNe occurring so close to their galaxy centers applies.”
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.”
PESSTO: survey description and products from the first data release by the Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey of Transient Objects (2014, background): “The long running and very successful nearby supernova (SN) searches of LOSS (Li et al. 2011; Leaman et al. 2011) and CHASE (Pignata et al. 2009), are aided by the large community of well equipped and experienced amateur astronomers throughout the world who have also increased their detection limits…”
THE COSMIC CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVA RATE DOES NOT MATCH THE MASSIVE-STAR FORMATION RATE (2011, methodology): “The Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS) has recently published the best measurement of the cosmic SNR at low redshifts, using CC SNe collected over many years of systematically surveying galaxies within∼ 200 Mpc (Leaman et al. 2011; Li et al. 2011a,b; Maoz et al. 2011).”
The Complete Light-curve Sample of Spectroscopically Confirmed SNe Ia from Pan-STARRS1 and Cosmological Constraints from the Combined Pantheon Sample (2017, background): “This approach would reveal various selection biases beyond just volume limited versus magnitude limited, like selection based on host galaxy type (Leaman et al. 2011).”
THE SUPERNOVA DELAY TIME DISTRIBUTION IN GALAXY CLUSTERS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR TYPE-Ia PROGENITORS AND METAL ENRICHMENT (2010, methodology): “Maoz et al. (2010) applied the method to a subsample of the galaxies in the Lick Observatory SN Search (Filippenko et al. 2010; Leaman et al. 2010; Li et al. 2010a,b), having SFH reconstructions by Tojeiro et al. (2009) based on data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; York et al, 2000).”
IDENTIFYING ELUSIVE ELECTROMAGNETIC COUNTERPARTS TO GRAVITATIONAL WAVE MERGERS: AN END-TO-END SIMULATION (2012, background): “Thanks to systematic optical synoptic surveys, rate estimates of different classes of SNe occuring in a range of galaxy hosts now exist; for instance, corecollapse SNe rate is 7.1 (± 0.1)× 10−5 Mpc−3 yr−1 (see e.g., Leaman et al. 2011; Li et al. 2011a,b).”
TYPE Ia SUPERNOVA RATE MEASUREMENTS TO REDSHIFT 2.5 FROM CANDELS: SEARCHING FOR PROMPT EXPLOSIONS IN THE EARLY UNIVERSE (2014, methodology): “The galsnid approach relies on a database of observed SN host galaxy properties (morphology, color, luminosity, etc.) from the Lick Observatory Supernova Survey (LOSS Leaman et al. 2011).”
Neutron Star Mergers Might Not Be the Only Source of r-process Elements in the Milky Way (2018, background): “…the ∼ 370 classified SNe Ia found in the Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS), between 15 % and 35 % of SNe Ia occur in early-type galaxies (Figure 5 in Leaman et al. 2011, see also Graur et al. 2017a,b), depending on whether we exclude or include S0-type galaxies in the early-type category.”
The Carnegie Supernova Project. I. Third Photometry Data Release of Low-redshift Type Ia Supernovae and Other White Dwarf Explosions (2017, methodology): “Two “targeted” searches, the Lick Observatory SN Search (LOSS; Filippenko et al. 2001; Leaman et al. 2011; Li et al. 2011) with the 0.76m Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) and the Chilean Automatic Supernova Search (Pignata et al. 2009), accounted for 55% of the SNe selected for follow-up…”