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DeepZipper. II. Searching for Lensed Supernovae in Dark Energy Survey Data with Deep Learning

by Eric D Suchyta
Publication Type
Journal
Journal Name
The Astrophysical Journal
Publication Date
Page Number
19
Volume
943
Issue
1

Gravitationally lensed supernovae (LSNe) are important probes of cosmic expansion, but they remain rare and difficult to find. Current cosmic surveys likely contain 5–10 LSNe in total while next-generation experiments are expected to contain several hundred to a few thousand of these systems. We search for these systems in observed Dark Energy Survey (DES) five year SN fields—10 3 sq. deg. regions of sky imaged in the griz bands approximately every six nights over five years. To perform the search, we utilize the DeepZipper approach: a multi-branch deep learning architecture trained on image-level simulations of LSNe that simultaneously learns spatial and temporal relationships from time series of images. We find that our method obtains an LSN recall of 61.13% and a false-positive rate of 0.02% on the DES SN field data. DeepZipper selected 2245 candidates from a magnitude-limited (mi < 22.5) catalog of 3,459,186 systems. We employ human visual inspection to review systems selected by the network and find three candidate LSNe in the DES SN fields.