An Efficient Approach to Obtaining Large Numbers of Distant Supernova Host Galaxy Redshifts

Abstract

We use the wide-field capabilities of the 2dF fibre positioner and the AAOmega spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) to obtain redshifts of galaxies that hosted supernovae during the first three years of the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS). With exposure times ranging from 10 to 60 ksec per galaxy, we were able to obtain redshifts for 400 host galaxies in two SNLS fields, thereby substantially increasing the total number of SNLS supernovae with host galaxy redshifts. The median redshift of the galaxies in our sample that hosted photometrically classified Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) is 0.77, which is 25% higher than the median redshift of spectroscopically confirmed SNe Ia in the three-year sample of the SNLS. Our results demonstrate that one can use wide-field fibre-fed multi-object spectrographs on 4m telescopes to efficiently obtain redshifts for large numbers of supernova host galaxies over the large areas of sky that will be covered by future high-redshift supernova surveys, such as the Dark Energy Survey.

22 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in PASA

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Improved Photometric Calibration of the SNLS and the SDSS Supernova Surveys
• OzDES multi-fibre spectroscopy for the Dark Energy Survey: first-year operation and results
• The Volumetric Rate of Superluminous Supernovae at z~1
• OzDES multifibre spectroscopy for the Dark Energy Survey: Three year results and first data release
• HELP: The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project
• Extending the supernova Hubble diagram to z~1.5 with the Euclid space mission
• The influence of Host Galaxies in Type Ia Supernova Cosmology
• DES Science Portal: Computing Photometric Redshifts
• Host Galaxy Spectra and Consequences for SN Typing From The SDSS SN Survey
• Cosmological Inference from Host-Selected Type Ia Supernova Samples
• Dark Energy Survey Deep Field photometric redshift performance and training incompleteness assessment
• Type Ia supernova Hubble diagrams with host galaxy photometric redshifts