The Young Supernova Experiment: Survey Goals, Overview, and Operations

TL;DR

The Young Supernova Experiment (YSE) is a novel optical survey on Pan-STARRS that aims to discover and characterize thousands of supernovae and transients, especially those very early after explosion, to support future cosmological and stellar explosion studies.

Contribution

YSE introduces a unique four-band, high-cadence survey capable of detecting faint, fast-rising supernovae within hours to days of explosion, expanding the observational parameter space.

Findings

Discovered or observed 8.3% of 2020 transients reported to IAU.

Plans to increase sky coverage to 1500 square degrees and find ~5000 SNe annually.

Able to detect transients as faint as 21.5 mag in gri bands.

Abstract

Time domain science has undergone a revolution over the past decade, with tens of thousands of new supernovae (SNe) discovered each year. However, several observational domains, including SNe within days or hours of explosion and faint, red transients, are just beginning to be explored. Here, we present the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE), a novel optical time-domain survey on the Pan-STARRS telescopes. Our survey is designed to obtain well-sampled $griz$ light curves for thousands of transient events up to $z \approx 0.2$. This large sample of transients with 4-band light curves will lay the foundation for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, providing a critical training set in similar filters and a well-calibrated low-redshift anchor of cosmologically useful SNe Ia to benefit dark energy science. As the name suggests, YSE complements and extends other ongoing time-domain surveys by discovering fast-rising SNe within a few hours to days of explosion. YSE is the only current four-band time-domain survey and is able to discover transients as faint $\sim$21.5 mag in $gri$ and $\sim$20.5 mag in $z$, depths that allow us to probe the earliest epochs of stellar explosions. YSE is currently observing approximately 750 square degrees of sky every three days and we plan to increase the area to 1500 square degrees in the near future. When operating at full capacity, survey simulations show that YSE will find $\sim$5000 new SNe per year and at least two SNe within three days of explosion per month. To date, YSE has discovered or observed 8.3% of the transient candidates reported to the International Astronomical Union in 2020. We present an overview of YSE, including science goals, survey characteristics and a summary of our transient discoveries to date.