Rates and progenitors of type Ia supernovae

The remarkable uniformity of Type Ia supernovae has allowed astronomers to use them as distance indicators to measure the properties and expansion history of the Universe. However, Type Ia supernovae exhibit intrinsic variation in both their spectra and observed brightness. The brightness variations have been approximately corrected by various methods, but there remain intrinsic variations that limit the statistical power of current and future observations of distant supernovae for cosmological purposes. There may be systematic effects in this residual variation that evolve with redshift and thus limit the cosmological power of SN Ia luminosity-distance experiments. To reduce these systematic uncertainties, we need a deeper understanding of the observed variations in Type Ia supernovae. Toward this end, the Nearby Supernova Factory has been designed to discover hundreds of Type Ia supernovae in a systematic and automated fashion and study them in detail. This project will observe these supernovae spectrophotometrically to provide the homogeneous high-quality data set necessary to improve the understanding and calibration of these vital cosmological yardsticks. From 1998 to 2003, in collaboration with the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a systematic and automated searching program was conceived and executed using the computing facilities at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Energy Research Supercomputing Center. An automated search had never been attempted on this scale. A number of planned future large supernovae projects are predicated on the ability to find supernovae quickly, reliably, and efficiently in large datasets. A prototype run of the SNfactory search pipeline conducted from 2002 to 2003 discovered 83 SNe at a final rate of 12 SNe/month. A large, homogeneous search of this scale offers an excellent opportunity to measure the rate of Type Ia supernovae. This thesis presents a new method for analyzing the true sensitivity of a multi-epoch supernova search and finds a Type Ia supernova rate from z {approx} 0.01-0.1 of r{sub V} = 4.26{sub -1.93 -0.10}{sup +1.39 +0.10} h{sup 3} x 10{sup -4} SNe Ia/yr/Mpc{sup 3} from a preliminary analysis of a subsample of the SNfactory prototype search. Several unusual supernovae were found in the course of the SNfactory prototype search. One in particular, SN 2002ic, was the first SN Ia to exhibit convincing evidence for a circumstellar medium and offers valuable insight into the progenitors of Type Ia supernovae.