No Arabic abstract
We review the needs of the supernova community for improvements in survey coordination and data sharing that would significantly boost the constraints on dark energy using samples of Type Ia supernovae from the Vera C. Rubin Observatories, the textit{Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope}, and the textit{Euclid} Mission. We discuss improvements to both statistical and systematic precision that the combination of observations from these experiments will enable. For example, coordination will result in improved photometric calibration, redshift measurements, as well as supernova distances. We also discuss what teams and plans should be put in place now to start preparing for these combined data sets. Specifically, we request coordinated efforts in field selection and survey operations, photometric calibration, spectroscopic follow-up, pixel-level processing, and computing. These efforts will benefit not only experiments with Type Ia supernovae, but all time-domain studies, and cosmology with multi-messenger astrophysics.
We investigate the possibility that a statistical detection of the galaxy parallax shift due to the Earths motion with respect to the CMB frame (cosmic secular parallax) could be made by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) or by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (NGRST), and used to measure the Hubble constant. We make mock galaxy surveys which extend to redshift z=0.06 from a large N-body simulation, and include astrometric errors from the LSST and NGRST science requirements, redshift errors and peculiar velocities. We include spectroscopic redshifts for the brightest galaxies (r < 18) in the fiducial case. We use these catalogues to make measurements of parallax versus redshift,for various assumed survey parameters and analysis techniques. We find that in order to make a competitive measurement it will be necessary to model and correct for the peculiar velocity component of galaxy proper motions. It will also be necessary to push astrometry of extended sources into a new regime, and combine information from the different elements of resolved galaxies. In an appendix we describe some simple tests of galaxy image registration which yield relatively promising results. For our fiducial survey parameters, we predict an rms error on the direct geometrical measurement of H0 of 2.8% for LSST and 0.8% for NGRST.
The Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will demonstrate the high-contrast technology necessary for visible-light exoplanet imaging and spectroscopy from space via direct imaging of Jupiter-size planets and debris disks. This in-space experience is a critical step toward future, larger missions targeted at direct imaging of Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars. This paper presents an overview of the current instrument design and requirements, highlighting the critical hardware, algorithms, and operations being demonstrated. We also describe several exoplanet and circumstellar disk science cases enabled by these capabilities. A competitively selected Community Participation Program team will be an integral part of the technology demonstration and could perform additional CGI observations beyond the initial tech demo if the instrument performance warrants it.
Strong lensing by galaxy clusters can be used to significantly expand the survey reach, thus allowing observation of magnified high-redshift supernovae that otherwise would remain undetected. Strong lensing can also provide multiple images of the galaxies that lie behind the clusters. Detection of strongly lensed Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) is especially useful because of their standardizable brightness, as they can be used to improve either cluster lensing models or independent measurements of cosmological parameters. The cosmological parameter, the Hubble constant, is of particular interest given the discrepancy regarding its value from measurements with different approaches. Here, we explore the feasibility of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) of detecting strongly lensed SNe in the field of five galaxy clusters (Abell 1689 and Hubble Frontier Fields clusters) that have well-studied lensing models. Considering the 88 systems composed of 268 individual multiple images in the five cluster fields, we find that the LSST will be sensitive to SNe~Ia (SNe~IIP) exploding in 41 (23) galaxy images. The range of redshift of these galaxies is between $1.01 < z < 3.05$. During its 10 years of operation, LSST is expected to detect $0.2pm0.1$ SN~Ia and $0.9pm0.3$ core collapse SNe. However, as LSST will observe many more massive galaxy clusters, it is likely that the expectations are higher. We stress the importance of having an additional observing program for photometric and spectroscopic follow-up of the strongly lensed SNe detected by LSST.
We explore synergies between the space-based Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) and the ground-based Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). In particular, we consider a scenario where the currently envisioned survey strategy for WFIRSTs High Latitude Survey (HLS), i.e., 2000 square degrees in four narrow photometric bands is altered in favor of a strategy that combines rapid coverage of the LSST area (to full LSST depth) in one band. We find that a 5-month WFIRST survey in the W-band can cover the full LSST survey area providing high-resolution imaging for >95% of the LSST Year 10 gold galaxy sample. We explore a second, more ambitious scenario where WFIRST spends 1.5 years covering the LSST area. For this second scenario we quantify the constraining power on dark energy equation of state parameters from a joint weak lensing and galaxy clustering analysis, and compare it to an LSST-only survey and to the Reference WFIRST HLS survey. Our survey simulations are based on the WFIRST exposure time calculator and redshift distributions from the CANDELS catalog. Our statistical uncertainties account for higher-order correlations of the density field, and we include a wide range of systematic effects, such as uncertainties in shape and redshift measurements, and modeling uncertainties of astrophysical systematics, such as galaxy bias, intrinsic galaxy alignment, and baryonic physics. Assuming the 5-month WFIRST wide scenario, we find a significant increase in constraining power for the joint LSST+WFIRST wide survey compared to LSST Y10 (FoM(Wwide)= 2.4 FoM(LSST)) and compared to LSST+WFIRST HLS (FoM(Wwide)= 5.5 FoM(HLS)).
The existence of inhomogeneities in the observed Universe modifies the distance-redshift relations thereby affecting the results of cosmological tests in comparison to the ones derived assuming spatially uniform models. By modeling the inhomogeneities through a Zeldovich-Kantowski-Dyer-Roeder (ZKDR) approach which is phenomenologically characterized by a smoothness parameter $alpha$, we rediscuss the constraints on the cosmic parameters based on Supernovae type Ia and Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) data. The present analysis is restricted to a flat $Lambda$CDM model with the reasonable assumption that $Lambda$ does not clump. A $chi^{2}$-analysis using 557 SNe Ia data from the Union2 Compilation Data (Amanullah {it et al.} 2010) constrains the pair of parameters ($Omega_m, alpha$) to $Omega_m=0.27_{-0.03}^{+0.08}$($2sigma$) and $alpha geq 0.25$. A similar analysis based only on 59 Hymnium GRBs (Wei 2010) constrains the matter density parameter to be $Omega_m= 0.35^{+0.62}_{-0.24}$ ($2sigma$) while all values for the smoothness parameter are allowed. By performing a joint analysis, it is found that $Omega_m = 0.27^{+0.06}_{-0.03}$ and $alpha geq 0.52$. As a general result, although considering that current GRB data alone cannot constrain the smoothness $alpha$ parameter our analysis provides an interesting cosmological probe for dark energy even in the presence of inhomogeneities.