The Pan-STARRS1 ( PS1 ) survey has obtained imaging in 5 bands ( griz y _ { P 1 } ) over 10 Medium Deep Survey ( MDS ) fields covering a total of 70 square degrees .
This paper describes the search for apparently hostless supernovae ( SNe ) within the first year of PS1 MDS data with an aim of discovering superluminous supernovae ( SLSNe ) .
A total of 249 hostless transients were discovered down to a limiting magnitude of M _ { AB } \sim 23.5 , of which 76 were classified as type Ia SNe .
There were 57 SNe with complete light curves that are likely core-collapse SNe ( CCSNe ) or type Ic SLSNe and 12 of these have had spectra taken .
Of these 12 hostless , non-type Ia SNe , 7 were SLSNe of type Ic at redshifts between 0.5-1.4 .
This illustrates that the discovery rate of type Ic SLSNe can be maximised by concentrating on hostless transients and removing normal SNe Ia .
We present data for two possible SLSNe ; PS1-10pm ( z = 1.206 ) and PS1-10ahf ( z = 1.1 ) , and estimate the rate of type Ic SLSNe to be between 3 ^ { +3 } _ { -2 } \times 10 ^ { -5 } and 8 ^ { +2 } _ { -1 } \times 10 ^ { -5 } that of the CCSN rate within 0.3 \leq z \leq 1.4 by applying a Monte-Carlo technique .
The rate of slowly evolving , type Ic SLSNe ( such as SN2007bi ) is estimated as a factor of 10 lower than this range .