The Rate of Supernovae. II. the Selection Effects and the Frequencies Per Unit Blue Luminosity

Abstract

We present new estimates of the observed rates of SNe determined with the {\em control time} method applied to the files of observations of two long term, photographic SN searches carried out at the Asiago and Sternberg Observatories. Our calculations are applied to a galaxy sample extracted from RC3, in which 65 SNe have been discovered. This relatively large number of SNe has been redistributed in the different morphological classes of host galaxies giving the respective SN rates. The magnitude of two biases, the overexposure of the central part of galaxies and the inclination of the spiral parent galaxies, have been estimated. We show that due to overexposure a increasing fraction of SNe is lost in galaxies of increasing distances. Also, a reduced number of SNe is discovered in inclined galaxies ($i>30\degr$): SNII and Ib are more affected than Ia, as well as SNe in Sbc-Sd galaxies with respect to other spirals. We strengthen previous findings that the SN rates is proportional to the galaxy blue luminosity for all SN and Hubble types. Other sources of errors, besides those due to the statistics of the events, have been investigated. In particular those related to the adopted SN parameters (Cappellaro et al. (\cite{paper1})) and correction factor for overexposure and inclination. Moreover, we show that the frequencies of SNe per unit luminosity vary if different sources for the parameters of the sample galaxies are adopted, thus hampering the comparison of SN rates based on different galaxy samples. The overall rates per unit blue luminosity are similar to the previous