Cosmic Core-Collapse Supernovae from Upcoming Sky Surveys

TL;DR

Upcoming large sky surveys will significantly enhance our understanding of cosmic core-collapse supernovae, enabling precise measurements of their distribution, relation to star formation, and potential as distance indicators, despite challenges like dust obscuration.

Contribution

This paper quantifies the discovery potential of future sky surveys for supernovae, highlighting their role in cosmology, star formation history, and supernova physics, with strategies to address dust obscuration.

Findings

Supernova redshift distribution can be mapped with small statistical uncertainties.

Cosmic supernova rate measurable up to z ~ 0.5 for all types.

Type II supernovae can serve as independent distance indicators.

Abstract

Large synoptic (repeated scan) imaging sky surveys are poised to observe enormous numbers of core-collapse supernovae. We quantify the discovery potential of upcoming projects, including DES, Pan-STARRS, and LSST. These surveys will map out the cosmic core-collapse supernova redshift distribution via direct counting, with very small statistical uncertainties out to a redshift depth which is a strong function of the survey limiting magnitude. This supernova redshift history encodes rich information about cosmology, star formation, and supernova astrophysics and phenomenology; the large statistics of the supernova sample will be crucial to disentangle possible degeneracies among these issues. For example, the cosmic supernova rate can be measured to high precision out to z ~ 0.5 for all core-collapse types, and out to redshift z ~ 1 for Type IIn events. Because of the tight link between supernovae and star formation, synoptic sky surveys will provide precision measurements of the normalization and z < 1 history of cosmic star-formation rate in a manner independent of and complementary to current methods. Furthermore, Type II supernovae can serve as distance indicators and would independently cross-check Type Ia distances measured in the same surveys. Arguably the largest and least-controlled uncertainty in these efforts comes from dust obscuration of supernovae in their host galaxies; we outline a strategy to determine empirically the obscuration properties by leveraging the large supernova samples over a broad range of redshift. [abstract abridged]