From: "Jessica Fletcher" To: Subject: [Faculty] [Announce] Colloquium: 5/25/07 (DePoy) Date: Monday, May 21, 2007 11:25 AM P H Y S I C S C O L L O Q U I U M Darren DePoy Ohio State University Current and Future Surveys for type Ia Supernovae ABSTRACT I will describe two supernovae survey projects: the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II (SDSSII) Supernova Survey and the supernova search component of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Both are oriented towards identifying a large number of type Ia supernovae as distance indicators to use to constrain the history of the Hubble expansion parameter and lower the uncertainty in, for example, w (the dark energy equation of state). The SDSSII survey probes redshifts of roughly 0.05 to 0.35 and to date has discovered and measured light curves for 325 spectroscopically confirmed type Ia supernovae, an increase of nearly a factor of 50 in the number of well-measured supernovae at this redshift range. When complete in 2008 the SDSSII survey should allow substantially improved analysis of the systematic errors inherent in using type Ia supernovae as distance indicators and provide ~10% precision estimates of w. The DES supernova search should commence in 2010 and provide ~2000 well-measured type Ia supernovae at redshifts of 0.25 to 0.75. The DES survey will use substantially the same measurement techniques as the SDSSII survey, so the two should coherently combine and allow improved precision. Friday, May 25, 2007 4:00 p.m. ENPH 501 Department of Physics Texas A&M University _______________________________________________ Announce mailing list Announce@physics.tamu.edu http://mail.physics.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/announce _______________________________________________ Faculty mailing list Faculty@physics.tamu.edu http://mail.physics.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/faculty