Discovering Supernovae at the Epoch of Reionization with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Abstract Massive stars play critical roles for the reionization of the universe. Individual massive stars at the reionization epoch (z > 6) are too faint to observe and quantify their contributions to reionization. Some massive stars, however, explode as superluminous supernovae (SLSNe) or pair-instability supernovae (PISNe) that are luminous enough to observe even at z > 6 and allow for the direct characterization of massive star properties at the reionization epoch. In addition, hypothetical long-sought-after PISNe are expected to be present preferentially at high redshifts, and their discovery will have a tremendous impact on our understanding of massive star evolution and the formation of stellar mass black holes. The near-infrared Wide Field Instrument on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will excel at discovering such rare high-redshift supernovae. In this work, we investigate the best survey strategy to discover and identify SLSNe and PISNe at z > 6 with Roman. We show that the combination of the F158 and F213 filters can clearly separate both SLSNe and PISNe at z > 6 from nearby supernovae through their colors and magnitudes. The limiting magnitudes are required to be 27.0 mag and 26.5 mag in the F158 and F213 filters, respectively, to identify supernovae at z > 6. If we conduct a 10 deg2 transient survey with these limiting magnitudes for five years with a cadence of one year, we expect to discover 22.5 ± 2.8 PISNe and 3.1 ± 0.3 SLSNe at z > 6, depending on the cosmic star formation history. The same survey is estimated to discover 76.1 ± 8.2 PISNe and 9.1 ± 0.9 SLSNe at 5 < z < 6. Such a supernova survey requires the total observational time of approximately 525 hr in five years. The legacy data acquired with the survey will also be beneficial for many different science cases including the study of high-redshift galaxies.