Constraints on the rate of supernovae lasting for more than a year from Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam

TL;DR

This study used the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam to search for supernovae lasting over a year, constraining their rates and finding that long-lasting supernovae are likely mostly Type IIn, with no pair-instability supernovae detected.

Contribution

First long-term deep survey constraining supernovae lasting over a year and their rates using Subaru/HSC data.

Findings

Rate of supernovae lasting over a year is approximately 1.4 events per deg2 per year.

About 40% of Type IIn supernovae have long-lasting light curves.

No pair-instability supernovae candidates lasting over a year were found.

Abstract

Some supernovae such as pair-instability supernovae are predicted to have the duration of more than a year in the observer frame. To constrain the rates of supernovae lasting for more than a year, we conducted a long-term deep transient survey using Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) on the 8.2m Subaru telescope. HSC is a wide-field (a 1.75 deg2 field-of-view) camera and it can efficiently conduct transient surveys. We observed the same 1.75 deg2 field repeatedly using the g, r, i, and z band filters with the typical depth of 26 mag for 4 seasons (from late 2016 to early 2020). Using these data, we searched for transients lasting for more than a year. Two supernovae were detected in 2 continuous seasons, one supernova was detected in 3 continuous seasons, but no transients lasted for all 4 seasons searched. The discovery rate of supernovae lasting for more than a year with the typical limiting magnitudes of 26 mag is constrained to be 1.4^{+1.3}_{-0.7}(stat.)^{+0.2}_{-0.3}(sys.) events deg-2 yr-1. All the long-lasting supernovae we found are likely Type IIn supernovae and our results indicate that about 40% of Type IIn supernovae have long-lasting light curves. No plausible pair-instability supernova candidates lasting for more than a year are discovered. By comparing the survey results and survey simulations, we constrain the luminous pair-instability supernova rate up to z ~ 3 should be of the order of 100 Gpc-3 yr-1 at most, which is 0.01 - 0.1 per cent of the core-collapse supernova rate.