Program: GN-2009A-Q-5

The Pan-STARRS-1 survey (PS1) will be the widest and deepest survey of the local Universe for transient objects to date. It will provide an unprecedented harvest of core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe), the final products of massive stars. Our Monte-Carlo calculations suggest that within z<0.04 (~150Mpc) we will discover ~2650 SNe in the 3.5 yr survey. The depth of the PS1 survey will allow a complete and unbiased galaxy survey of all SN types within this volume, providing us with a new measure of the local rate of SNe, some twenty times better than before, and allow metallicity resolution for the first time. The PS1 survey will uncover the rare explosions from the most massive stars in the Universe, which are likely linked to GRBs and pair-instability SNe. We propose a multi-telescope, long term proposal for 3.5 years to study CCSNe discovered in PS1 for two focused science projects.