[69.10] Spectroscopy of High-Redshift Supernovae from the ESSENCE Project: The First Two Years

AAS 205th Meeting, 9-13 January 2005
Session 69 Cosmology: Population III, Distant SNe, and Dark Energy
Poster, Tuesday, January 11, 2005, 9:20am-6:30pm, Exhibit Hall

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[69.10] Spectroscopy of High-Redshift Supernovae from the ESSENCE Project: The First Two Years

T. Matheson (NOAO), ESSENCE Team

We present the results of the first two years of spectroscopic observations of targets discovered by the Equation of State: SupErNovae trace Cosmic Expansion (ESSENCE) project. The goal of ESSENCE is to use a sample of ~200 Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) at moderate redshifts (0.2 < z < 0.8) to place constraints on the equation of state of the Universe. Spectroscopy not only provides the redshift of the object, but also confirmation that the discoveries are SNe Ia. This confirmation is critical to the project, as techniques developed to determine luminosity distances to SNe Ia depend upon the knowledge that the objects at high redshift are the same as the ones at low redshift. We describe the methods of target selection and prioritization, the telescopes and detectors, and software used to identify objects. The redshifts deduced from spectral matching of high-redshift SNe Ia with low-redshift SNe Ia are consistent with those determined from host-galaxy spectra. We show that the high-redshift SNe Ia match well with low-redshift templates.

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