AAS 204th Meeting, June 2004
Session 63 Exploding Stars
Poster, Wednesday, June 2, 2004, 10:00am-7:00pm, Ballroom

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[63.12] The Nearby Supernova Factory

B. C. Lee, G. Aldering, C. T. Day, S. Loken, P. Nugent, S. Perlmutter, J. Siegrist, R. Scalzo, R. C. Thomas, L. Wang, W. M. Wood-Vasey (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA), G. Adam, R. Bacon, C. Bonnaud, L. Capoani, D. Dubet, B. Lantz, J-P. Lemonnier, A. Pecontal, E. Pecontal, F. Henault (Centre de Recherche Astronomique de Lyon), N. Blanc, G. Boudoul, S. Bongard, A. Castera, Y. Copin, E. Gangler, G. Smadja (Institut de Physique Nucleaire de Lyon), R. Kessler (Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, Chicago, IL), P. Antilogus, P. Astier, E. Barrelet, G. Garavini, S. Gilles, L-A. Guevara, D. Imbault, C. Juramy, R. Pain, R. Taillet, D. Vincent (Laboratoire de Physique Nucleaire et de Haute Energies de Paris), C. Baltay, D. Rabinovitz, J. Snyder (Yale)

The Nearby Supernova Factory (SNfactory) will obtain and study a uniform high-quality dataset of flux-calibrated optical spectra at 10-15 epochs, starting 5-15 days before maximum light, for each of approximately 300 nearby Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). When combined with current (SCP, HZSST, SNLS, ESSENCE) and future (SNAP, LSST) datasets of high-redshift SNe Ia, the SNfactory dataset will substantially improve the statistical measurements of the dark energy equation of state. This project will also improve our understanding of SNe Ia and their use as standardized candles.

The SNfactory targets SNe Ia in the redshift range of z approx. 0.03 to 0.08; near enough to allow spectral observations every few days of many SNe while still distant enough to be in the smooth Hubble flow and minimize relative luminosity errors due to peculiar velocities. The SNe are found in wide-field imaging data provided by the Palomar Consortium (Yale/JPL/Caltech) and by the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) project at JPL, making the search unbiased with respect to host galaxy type. The identification and followup spectra will typically start within 1-3 days of the discovery epoch, using the SuperNova Integral Field Spectrograph (SNIFS) instrument which is to be installed on the automated University of Hawaii 2.2m telescope in April of this year. Here we present the current project status in the first weeks after the installation of SNIFS.


If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://snfactory.lbl.gov/. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: BCLee@LBL.gov

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