First-Year Spectroscopy for the SDSS-II Supernova Survey

Abstract

This paper presents spectroscopy of supernovae discovered in the first season of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey. This program searches for and measures multi-band light curves of supernovae in the redshift range z = 0.05 - 0.4, complementing existing surveys at lower and higher redshifts. Our goal is to better characterize the supernova population, with a particular focus on SNe Ia, improving their utility as cosmological distance indicators and as probes of dark energy. Our supernova spectroscopy program features rapid-response observations using telescopes of a range of apertures, and provides confirmation of the supernova and host-galaxy types as well as precise redshifts. We describe here the target identification and prioritization, data reduction, redshift measurement, and classification of 129 SNe Ia, 16 spectroscopically probable SNe Ia, 7 SNe Ib/c, and 11 SNe II from the first season. We also describe our efforts to measure and remove the substantial host galaxy contamination existing in the majority of our SN spectra.

Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal(47pages, 9 figures)

References in corpus (8)

• Observational Constraints on the Nature of the Dark Energy: First Cosmological Results from the ESSENCE Supernova Survey
• Improved Distances to Type Ia Supernovae with Multicolor Light Curve Shapes: MLCS2k2
• Determining the Type, Redshift, and Age of a Supernova Spectrum
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey: Technical Summary
• SDSS Standard Star Catalog for Stripe 82: the Dawn of Industrial 1% Optical Photometry
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey: Search Algorithm and Follow-up Observations
• The Peculiar SN 2005hk: Do Some Type Ia Supernovae Explode as Deflagrations?
• Extracting clean supernova spectra