| Abstract: |
I will present results from our program to detect supernovae at greater distances than previously possible. To date, we have built a sample of 12 supernova detections using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey having redshifts between z ~ 2 - 4, confirmed with deep Keck spectroscopy. To be detected, the supernovae must be very luminous in the ultraviolet, with three events classified as super-luminous. The extremely high energies of these supernovae require very massive progenitor stars which are very rare locally. However, such events are expected to have been more common at high redshift, including the first generation of stars that formed from pristine gas shortly after the Big Bang. Because regions of pristine gas have been discovered at redshifts as low as z~3, our detections enter the regime of the first stars for the first time. Finally, I will discuss the capability to detect a large number of high redshift supernovae using Hyper-SuprimeCam wide-field camera soon to be installed on Subaru and the exciting potential to detect events to z ~6 that approaching the epoch of reionization of the Universe. |
