Extremely Large Telescope

Abstract:

In 1969, Donald Lynden-Bell became the first astrophysicist to suggest that supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies might generate the profuse energy put out by quasars — the astonishingly luminous distant bodies identified by astronomer Maarten Schmidt earlier that decade. Lynden-Bell proposed that quasars are powered by the release of gravitational energy as material falls into the deep potential well of the black hole, a process that is much more efficient than thermonuclear fusion

Abstract:

We present detailed simulations of integral field spectroscopic observations of a supernova in a host galaxy at z ∼ 3, as observed by the HARMONI spectrograph on the Extremely Large Telescope, asssisted by laser tomographic adaptive optics. The goal of the simulations, using the HSIM simulation tool, is to determine whether HARMONI can discern the supernova Type from spectral features in the supernova spectrum. We find that in a 3 hour observation, covering the near-infrared H and K bands, at a spectral resolving power of ∼3000, and using the 20×20 mas spaxel scale, we can classify supernova Type Ia and their redshift robustly up to 80 days past maximum light (20 days in the supernova rest frame). We show that HARMONI will provide spectra at z ∼ 3 that are of comparable (or better) quality to the best spectra we can currently obtain at z ∼ 1, thus allowing studies of cosmic expansion rates to be pushed to substantially higher redshifts.