No Arabic abstract
The gravitational magnification and demagnification of Type Ia supernovae (SNe) modify their positions on the Hubble diagram, shifting the distance estimates from the underlying luminosity-distance relation. This can introduce a systematic uncertainty in the dark energy equation of state (EOS) estimated from SNe, although this systematic is expected to average away for sufficiently large data sets. Using mock SN samples over the redshift range $0 < z leq 1.7$ we quantify the lensing bias. We find that the bias on the dark energy EOS is less than half a percent for large datasets ($gtrsim$ 2,000 SNe). However, if highly magnified events (SNe deviating by more than 2.5$sigma$) are systematically removed from the analysis, the bias increases to $sim$ 0.8%. Given that the EOS parameters measured from such a sample have a 1$sigma$ uncertainty of 10%, the systematic bias related to lensing in SN data out to $z sim 1.7$ can be safely ignored in future cosmological measurements.
Observation of thousands of type Ia supernovae should offer the most direct approach to probe the dark energy content of the universe. This will be undertaken by future large ground-based surveys followed by a space mission (SNAP/JDEM). We address the problem of extracting the cosmological parameters from the future data in a model independent approach, with minimal assumptions on the prior knowledge of some parameters. We concentrate on the comparison between a fiducial model and the fitting function and adress in particular the effect of neglecting (or not) the time evolution of the equation of state. We present a quantitative analysis of the bias which can be introduced by the fitting procedure. Such bias cannot be ignored as soon as the statistical errors from present data are drastically improved.
In this letter we propose a test to detect the linearity of the dark energy equation of state, and apply it to two different Type Ia Supernova (SN Ia) data sets, Union2.1 and SNLS3. We find that: a. current SN Ia data are well described by a dark energy equation of state linear in the cosmic scale factor a, at least up to a redshift z = 1, independent of the pivot points chosen for the linear relation; b. there is no significant evidence of any deviation from linearity. This apparent linearity may reflect the limit of dark energy information extractable from current SN Ia data.
We develop an efficient, non-parametric Bayesian method for reconstructing the time evolution of the dark energy equation of state w(z) from observational data. Of particular importance is the choice of prior, which must be chosen carefully to minimise variance and bias in the reconstruction. Using a principal component analysis, we show how a correlated prior can be used to create a smooth reconstruction and also avoid bias in the mean behaviour of w(z). We test our method using Wiener reconstructions based on Fisher matrix projections, and also against more realistic MCMC analyses of simulated data sets for Planck and a future space-based dark energy mission. While the accuracy of our reconstruction depends on the smoothness of the assumed w(z), the relative error for typical dark energy models is <10% out to redshift z=1.5.
We combine recent measurements of Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies, Supernovae luminosity distances and Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations to derive constraints on the dark energy equation of state w in the redshift range 0<z<2, using a principal components approach. We find no significant deviations from the expectations of a cosmological constant. However, combining the datasets we find slight indication for w<-1 at low redshift, thus highlighting how these datasets prefer a non-constant w. Nevertheless the cosmological constant is still in agreement with these observations, while we find that some classes of alternative models may be in tension with the inferred w(z) behaviour.
We consider the effects of weak gravitational lensing on observations of 196 spectroscopically confirmed Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) from years 1 to 3 of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We simultaneously measure both the angular correlation function and the non-Gaussian skewness caused by weak lensing. This approach has the advantage of being insensitive to the intrinsic dispersion of SNe Ia magnitudes. We model the amplitude of both effects as a function of $sigma_8$, and find $sigma_8 = 1.2^{+0.9}_{-0.8}$. We also apply our method to a subsample of 488 SNe from the Joint Light-curve Analysis (JLA) (chosen to match the redshift range we use for this work), and find $sigma_8 = 0.8^{+1.1}_{-0.7}$. The comparable uncertainty in $sigma_8$ between DES-SN and the larger number of SNe from JLA highlights the benefits of homogeneity of the DES-SN sample, and improvements in the calibration and data analysis.