Prospects for Strongly Lensed Supernovae Behind Hubble Frontier Fields Galaxy Clusters with the James Webb Space Telescope

Abstract

Measuring time delays from strongly lensed supernovae (SNe) is emerging as a novel and independent tool for estimating the Hubble constant (H 0 ). This is very important given the recent discord in the value of H 0 from two methods that probe different distance ranges. The success of this technique will rely of our ability to discover strongly lensed SNe with measurable time delays. Here, we present the magnifications and the time delays for the multiply-imaged galaxies behind the Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF) galaxy clusters, by using recently published lensing models. Continuing on our previous work done for Abell 1689 (A1689) and Abell 370, we also show the prospects of observing strongly lensed SNe behind the HFF clusters with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). With four 1-hour visits in one year, the summed expectations of all six HFF clusters are ∼ 0.5 core-collapse (CC) SNe and ∼ 0.06 Type Ia SNe (SNe Ia) in F115W band, while with F150W the expectations are higher, ∼ 0.9 CC SNe and ∼ 0.06 SNe Ia. These estimates match those expected by only surveying A1689, proving that the performance of A1689 as gravitational telescope is superior. In the five HFF clusters presented here, we find that F150W will be able to detect SNe Ia (SNe IIP) exploding in 93 (80) pairs multiply-imaged galaxies with time delays of less than 5 years.

The JWST Discovery of the Triply Imaged Type Ia “Supernova H0pe” and Observations of the Galaxy Cluster PLCK G165.7+67.0

“…The Young et al (2008) prescription implies a lower limit on the rate of core-collapse (cc) SNe 1-3 SNe yr −1 . This value is consistent with results of Petrushevska et al (2018), who summed ccSNe over the six Hubble Frontier Fields (Lotz et al 2017). They found that for a JWST/NIRCam imaging cadence of four 1 hr visits per year, the rate integrated over all six HFFs is expected to be ∼0.9 ccSNe and ∼0.06 SNe Ia.…”

Strong gravitational lensing of explosive transients

“…Therefore, we can constrain the supernova rate at very high redshifts by observations of strongly lensed supernovae at such high redshifts [138,315,316]. The search of lensed high-redshift supernovae can be conducted efficiently by monitoring massive clusters of galaxies [317][318][319][320][321][322].…”

Deep Extragalactic VIsible Legacy Survey (DEVILS): DR1 Blended Spectra Search for Candidate Strong Gravitational Lenses

“…The most viable observational approach is to monitor a great number of suspected galaxy-galaxy lenses using near-future observatories, e.g. the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, Petrushevska et al 2018), the Vera Rubin Observatory (Liao 2018;Tu et al 2019), andZwicky Transient Survey (ZTF, Shu et al 2018;Goldstein et al 2019).…”