How to Find Gravitationally Lensed Type Ia Supernovae

TL;DR

This paper introduces a photometric algorithm to identify gravitationally lensed Type Ia supernovae in wide-field surveys, significantly increasing the expected discovery rate and enabling high-redshift cosmological measurements.

Contribution

The authors present a simple, purely photometric method for detecting multiply imaged SNe Ia, improving discovery forecasts for LSST and ZTF surveys by over an order of magnitude.

Findings

LSST could discover up to 500 lensed SNe Ia in 10 years.

ZTF could find up to 10 lensed SNe Ia in 3 years.

The method effectively controls AGN contamination.

Abstract

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) that are multiply imaged by gravitational lensing can extend the SN Ia Hubble diagram to very high redshifts $(z\gtrsim 2)$, probe potential SN Ia evolution, and deliver high-precision constraints on $H_0$, $w$, and $\Omega_m$ via time delays. However, only one, iPTF16geu, has been found to date, and many more are needed to achieve these goals. To increase the multiply imaged SN Ia discovery rate, we present a simple algorithm for identifying gravitationally lensed SN Ia candidates in cadenced, wide-field optical imaging surveys. The technique is to look for supernovae that appear to be hosted by elliptical galaxies, but that have absolute magnitudes implied by the apparent hosts' photometric redshifts that are far brighter than the absolute magnitudes of normal SNe Ia (the brightest type of supernovae found in elliptical galaxies). Importantly, this purely photometric method does not require the ability to resolve the lensed images for discovery. AGN, the primary sources of contamination that affect the method, can be controlled using catalog cross-matches and color cuts. Highly magnified core-collapse supernovae will also be discovered as a byproduct of the method. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, we forecast that LSST can discover up to 500 multiply imaged SNe Ia using this technique in a 10-year $z$-band search, more than an order of magnitude improvement over previous estimates (Oguri & Marshall 2010). We also predict that ZTF should find up to 10 multiply imaged SNe Ia using this technique in a 3-year $R$-band search---despite the fact that this survey will not resolve a single system.