The MOST Hosts survey (Multi-Object Spectroscopy of Transient Hosts) is planned to run throughout the five years of operation of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and will generate a spectroscopic catalog of the hosts of most transients observed to date, in particular all the supernovae observed by most public, untargeted, wide-field, optical surveys (PTF/iPTF, SDSS II, ZTF, DECAT, DESIRT).
Scientific questions for which the MOST Hosts survey will be useful include Type Ia supernova cosmology, fundamental plane and peculiar velocity measure- ments, and the understanding of the correlations between transients and their host galaxy properties.
Of all the transients in the MOST Hosts list, only 26.7% have existing classifications, and so the survey will provide redshifts (and luminosities) for nearly 30, 000 transients. The survey will also be timely, as a way to provide a training sample of spectro- scopically observed transients for classifiers relying only on photometry, as we enter an era when most newly observed transients (e.g. those detected with the Rubin Observatory) will lack spectroscopic classification.
The MOST Hosts DESI survey data will be released through the Wiserep platform on a rolling cadence and updated to match the DESI releases. Check the Status & Schedule section of this website for updates!