The Zwicky Transient Facility Type Ia supernova survey: first data release and results

TL;DR

The Zwicky Transient Facility's first data release presents a large, high-redshift sample of over 700 spectroscopically classified Type Ia supernovae, enabling improved cosmological distance measurements and early detection insights.

Contribution

This paper introduces the first data release of ZTF, providing a substantial, high-quality sample of SNe Ia with early detections and spectroscopic data, advancing supernova cosmology research.

Findings

Sample size of 761 SNe Ia with spectroscopic classification.

Median detection 13.5 days before maximum light.

Nearly fifty SNe suitable for calibrator distance measurements.

Abstract

Type Ia supernovae (SNe~Ia) in the nearby Hubble flow are excellent distance indicators in cosmology. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has observed a large sample of supernovae from an untargeted, rolling survey, reaching $20.8, 20.6, 20.3$ mag in $g$ $r$, and $i$-band, respectively. With a FoV of 47 sq.deg, ZTF discovered $>$ 3000 SNe~Ia in a little over 2.5 years. Here, we report on the sample of 761 spectroscopically classified SNe~Ia from the first year of operations (DR1). The sample has a median redshift $\bar z =$ 0.057, nearly a factor of two higher than the current low-$z$ sample. Our sample has a total of 934 spectra, of which 632 were obtained with the robotic SEDm on Palomar P60. We assess the potential for precision cosmology for a total of 305 SNe with redshifts from host galaxy spectra. The sample is already comparable in size to the entire combined literature low-$z$ anchor sample. The median first detection is 13.5 days before maximum light, about 10 days earlier than the median in the literature. Furthermore, six SNe from our sample are at $D_L < 80$ Mpc, for which host galaxy distances can be obtained in the JWST era, such that we have calibrator and Hubble flow SNe observed with the same instrument. In the entire duration of ZTF-I, we have observed nearly fifty SNe for which we can obtain calibrator distances, key for percent level distance scale measurements.