No Arabic abstract
The use of Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) as cosmological tools has motivated significant effort to: understand what drives the intrinsic scatter of SN Ia distance modulus residuals after standardization, characterize the distribution of SN Ia colors, and explain why properties of the host galaxies of the SNe correlate with SN Ia distance modulus residuals. We use a compiled sample of $sim1450$ spectroscopically confirmed, photometric light-curves of SN Ia and propose a solution to these three problems simultaneously that also explains an empirical 11$sigma$ detection of the dependence of Hubble residual scatter on SN Ia color. We introduce a physical model of color where intrinsic SN Ia colors with a relatively weak correlation with luminosity are combined with extrinsic dust-like colors ($E(B-V)$) with a wide range of extinction parameter values ($R_V$). This model captures the observed trends of Hubble residual scatter and indicates that the dominant component of SN Ia intrinsic scatter is from variation in $R_V$. We also find that the recovered $E(B-V)$ and $R_V$ distributions differ based on global host-galaxy stellar mass and this explains the observed correlation ($gamma$) between mass and Hubble residuals seen in past analyses as well as an observed 4.5$sigma$ dependence of $gamma$ on SN Ia color. This finding removes any need to prescribe different intrinsic luminosities to different progenitor systems. Finally we measure biases in the equation-of-state of dark energy ($w$) up to $|Delta w|=0.04$ by replacing previous models of SN color with our dust-based model; this bias is larger than any systematic uncertainty in previous SN Ia cosmological analyses.
We use a sample of 1338 spectroscopically confirmed and photometrically classified Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia), sourced from the CSP, CfA, SDSS-II, and SNLS supernova samples, to examine the relationships between SNe Ia and the galaxies that host them. Our results provide confirmation with improved statistical significance that SNe Ia, after standardization, are on average more luminous in massive hosts (significance $rm > 5 sigma$), and decline more rapidly in massive hosts (significance $rm > 9sigma$) and in hosts with low specific star formation rates (significance $rm > 8sigma$). We study the variation of these relationships with redshift and detect no evolution. We split SNe Ia into pairs of subsets that are based on the properties of the hosts, and fit cosmological models to each subset. Including both systematic and statistical uncertainties, we do not find any significant shift in the best-fit cosmological parameters between the subsets. Among different SN Ia subsets, we find that SNe Ia in hosts with high specific star formation rates have the least intrinsic scatter ($rm sigma_{int}=0.08pm0.01$) in luminosity after standardization.
Kim et al. (2013) [K13] introduced a new methodology for determining peak-brightness absolute magnitudes of type Ia supernovae from multi-band light curves. We examine the relation between their parameterization of light curves and Hubble residuals, based on photometry synthesized from the Nearby Supernova Factory spectrophotometric time series, with global host-galaxy properties. The K13 Hubble residual step with host mass is $0.013pm 0.031$ mag for a supernova subsample with data coverage corresponding to the K13 training; at $ll 1sigma$, the step is not significant and lower than previous measurements. Relaxing the data coverage requirement the Hubble residual step with host mass is $0.045pm 0.026$ mag for the larger sample; a calculation using the modes of the distributions, less sensitive to outliers, yields a step of 0.019 mag. The analysis of this article uses K13 inferred luminosities, as distinguished from previous works that use magnitude corrections as a function of SALT2 color and stretch parameters: Steps at $>2sigma $ significance are found in SALT2 Hubble residuals in samples split by the values of their K13 $x(1)$ and $x(2)$ light-curve parameters. $x(1)$ affects the light-curve width and color around peak (similar to the $Delta m_{15}$ and stretch parameters), and $x(2)$ affects colors, the near-UV light-curve width, and the light-curve decline 20 to 30 days after peak brightness. The novel light-curve analysis, increased parameter set, and magnitude corrections of K13 may be capturing features of SN~Ia diversity arising from progenitor stellar evolution.
Conventional Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) cosmology analyses currently use a simplistic linear regression of magnitude versus color and light curve shape, which does not model intrinsic SN Ia variations and host galaxy dust as physically distinct effects, resulting in low color-magnitude slopes. We construct a probabilistic generative model for the dusty distribution of extinguished absolute magnitudes and apparent colors as the convolution of a intrinsic SN Ia color-magnitude distribution and a host galaxy dust reddening-extinction distribution. If the intrinsic color-magnitude ($M_B$ vs. $B-V$) slope $beta_{int}$ differs from the host galaxy dust law $R_B$, this convolution results in a specific curve of mean extinguished absolute magnitude vs. apparent color. The derivative of this curve smoothly transitions from $beta_{int}$ in the blue tail to $R_B$ in the red tail of the apparent color distribution. The conventional linear fit approximates this effective curve near the average apparent color, resulting in an apparent slope $beta_{app}$ between $beta_{int}$ and $R_B$. We incorporate these effects into a hierarchical Bayesian statistical model for SN Ia light curve measurements, and analyze a dataset of SALT2 optical light curve fits of 248 nearby SN Ia at z < 0.10. The conventional linear fit obtains $beta_{app} approx 3$. Our model finds a $beta_{int} = 2.3 pm 0.3$ and a distinct dust law of $R_B = 3.8 pm 0.3$, consistent with the average for Milky Way dust, while correcting a systematic distance bias of $sim 0.10$ mag in the tails of the apparent color distribution. Finally, we extend our model to examine the SN Ia luminosity-host mass dependence in terms of intrinsic and dust components.
A string of recent studies has debated the exact form and physical origin of an evolutionary trend between the peak luminosity of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) and the properties of the galaxies that host them. We shed new light on the discussion by presenting an analysis of ~200 low-redshift SNe Ia in which we measure the separation of Hubble residuals (HR; as probes of luminosity) between two host-galaxy morphological types. We show that this separation can test the predictions made by recently proposed models, using an independently and empirically determined distribution of each morphological type in host-property space. Our results are partially consistent with the new HR--age slope, but we find significant scatter in the predictions from different galaxy catalogues. The inconsistency in age illuminates an issue in the current debate that was not obvious in the long-discussed mass models: HR--host-property models are strongly dependent on the methods employed to determine galaxy properties. While our results demonstrate the difficulty in constructing a universal model for age as a proxy for host environment, our results indeed identify evolutionary trends between mass, age, morphology, and HR values, encouraging (or requiring, if such trends are to be accounted for in cosmological studies) further investigation.
Using the largest single-survey sample of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) to date, we study the relationship between properties of SNe Ia and those of their host galaxies, focusing primarily on correlations with Hubble residuals (HR). Our sample consists of 345 photometrically-classified or spectroscopically-confirmed SNeIa discovered as part of the SDSS-II Supernova Survey (SDSS-SNS). This analysis utilizes host-galaxy spectroscopy obtained during the SDSS-I/II spectroscopic survey and from an ancillary program on the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) that obtained spectra for nearly all host galaxies of SDSS-II SN candidates. In addition, we use photometric host-galaxy properties from the SDSS-SNS data release (Sako et al. 2014) such as host stellar mass and star-formation rate. We confirm the well-known relation between HR and host-galaxy mass and find a 3.6{sigma} significance of a non-zero linear slope. We also recover correlations between HR and host-galaxy gas-phase metallicity and specific star-formation rate as they are reported in the literature. With our large dataset, we examine correlations between HR and multiple host-galaxy properties simultaneously and find no evidence of a significant correlation. We also independently analyze our spectroscopically-confirmed and photometrically-classified SNe Ia and comment on the significance of similar combined datasets for future surveys.