Presentation 1 : Oral/Invited
The Nearby Supernova Factory
W. M. Wood-Vasey, G. Aldering, B. C. Lee, S. Loken, P. Nugent,
S. Perlmutter, J. Siegrist, L. Wang
(Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), P. Antilogus, P. Astier, D. Hardin, R. Pain
(Laboratoire de Physique Nucleaire et de Haute
Energies de Paris (LPNHE)),Y. Copin, G.Smadja, E. Gangler, Alain Castera
(Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, Lyon), G. Adam, R. Bacon, J. Lemmonier, E. Pecontal
(Centre de Recherche Astronomique de Lyon (CRAL)), R. Kessler (University of Chicago), Nearby Supernova Factory Collaboration
The Nearby Supernova Factory (SNfactory) is an ambitious project to
find and study in detail approximately 300 nearby Type Ia supernova at
redshifts 0.03 < z < 0.08. This program will provide an exceptional
data set of well-studied supernovae in the nearby smooth Hubble flow
which can be used as calibration for the current and future programs
designed to use supernovae to measure the cosmological parameters.
The first key ingredient for this program is a reliable supply of
Hubble-flow supernovae systematically discovered in numbers greater
than ever before using the same techniques as used in distant
supernovae searches. In 2002, 35 SNe were found using our testbed
pipeline for automated supernova search and discovery. The pipeline
uses data from the asteroid search conducted by the Near Earth
Asteroid Tracking group at JPL. Improvements in our subtraction
techniques and analysis, combined with an improved main searching
camera have allowed us to increase our SN discovery rate and we
anticipate discovering 100 SNe in 2003.
The second key part of the SNfactory is the SuperNova Integral Field
Spectrograph (SNIFS), scheduled to be mounted on the University of
Hawaii 2.2-m telescope in the fall of 2003. SNIFS is being built at
CRAL, IPNL, and LPNHE with CCDs from LBNL. This automated,
spectro-photometric quality instrument will allow for detailed study
of supernovae and their host galaxy environments.