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Title: Evidence for Cosmic Acceleration Is Robust to Observed Correlations between Type Ia Supernova Luminosity and Stellar Age

Journal Article · · The Astrophysical Journal. Letters (Online)
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [2]; ORCiD logo [3]; ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [4]; ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [5];  [6];  [7]
  1. Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD (United States)
  2. University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
  3. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
  4. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); University of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
  5. University of California, Santa Cruz, CA (United States)
  6. Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD (United States); Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD (United States)
  7. Duke University, Durham, NC (United States)
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Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are powerful standardizable candles for constraining cosmological models and provided the first evidence of the accelerated expansion of the universe. Their precision derives from empirical correlations, now measured from >1000 SNe Ia, between their luminosities, light-curve shapes, colors, and most recently with the stellar mass of their host galaxy. As mass correlates with other galaxy properties, alternative parameters have been investigated to improve SN Ia standardization though none have been shown to significantly alter the determination of cosmological parameters. We re-examine a recent claim, based on 34 SN Ia in nearby passive host galaxies, of a 0.05 mag Gyr-1 dependence of standardized SN Ia luminosity on host age, which, if extrapolated to higher redshifts, would be a bias up to 0.25 mag, challenging the inference of dark energy. We reanalyze this sample of hosts using both the original method and a Bayesian hierarchical model and find after a fuller accounting of the uncertainties the significance of a dependence on age to be ≤2σ and ~1σ after the removal of a single poorly sampled SN Ia. Here, to test the claim that a trend seen in old stellar populations can be applied to younger ages, we extend our analysis to a larger sample that includes young hosts. We find the residual dependence of host age (after all standardization typically employed for cosmological measurements) to be consistent with zero for 254 SNe Ia from the Pantheon sample, ruling out the large but low significance trend seen in passive hosts.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC); National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-05CH11231; SC0010007; NNG16PJ311I; NNG17PX03C
OSTI ID:
1647614
Journal Information:
The Astrophysical Journal. Letters (Online), Vol. 896, Issue 1; ISSN 2041-8213
Publisher:
Institute of Physics (IOP)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 23 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
dark energy
distance scale
supernovae: general
supernovae: individual (SN2003ic)