A New Empirical Model for Type Ia Supernovae Using Spectrophotometry from the Nearby Supernova Factory
Abstract
Type Ia supernovae are currently limited in their use for cosmology by dispersion in standardized magnitudes. A large part of this dispersion is due to the fact that the current lightcurve fitters do not describe the full range of Type Ia supernova diversity. I will present an empirical model of Type Ia supernovae that captures a wider range of supernova behavior and can improve magnitude standardization. This model is constructed using over 2000 spectrophotometric observations of Type Ia supernovae from the Nearby Supernova Factory. The true spectral time series for each supernova is modeled using Gaussian Processes. The supernova model predictions are used to calculate the principal components of the full set of supernova spectral time series. K-fold cross-validation is used to determine how many components correlate to absolute magnitude. Future work will test this method on independent photometric data sets.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #227
- Pub Date:
- January 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AAS...22712007S