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How SN Ia host-galaxy properties affect cosmological parameters

Published version
Peer-reviewed

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Authors

Campbell, H 

Abstract

We present a systematic study of the relationship between Type Ia Supernova (SN Ia) properties, and the characteristics of their host galaxies, using a sample of 581 SNe Ia from the full Sloan Digital Sky Survey II (SDSS-II) SN Survey. We also investigate the effects of this on the cosmological constraints derived from SNe~Ia. Compared to previous studies, our sample is larger by a factor of >4, and covers a substantially larger redshift range (up to z~0.5), which is directly applicable to the volume of cosmological interest. We measure a significant correlation (>5\sigma) between the host-galaxy stellar-mass and the SN~Ia Hubble Residuals (HR). We find a weak correlation (1.4\sigma) between the host-galaxy metallicity as measured from emission lines in the spectra, and the SN~Ia HR. We also find evidence that the slope of the correlation between host-galaxy mass and HR is -0.11 mag/log(Mhost/M) steeper in lower metallicity galaxies. We test the effects on a cosmological analysis using both the derived best-fitting correlations between host parameters and HR, and by allowing an additional free parameter in the fit to account for host properties which we then marginalize over when determining cosmological parameters. We see a shift towards more negative values of the equation of state parameter w, along with a shift to lower values of Ωm after applying mass or metallicity corrections. The shift in cosmological parameters with host-galaxy stellar-mass correction is consistent with previous studies. We find a best-fitting cosmology of Ωm=0.266−0.016+0.016, ΩΛ=0.740−0.018+0.018 and w=−1.151−0.121+0.123 (statistical errors only).

Description

Keywords

supernovae: general, cosmological parameters, dark energy, distance scale

Journal Title

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0035-8711
1365-2966

Volume Title

457

Publisher

Oxford University Press (OUP)
Sponsorship
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/K000985/1)
This work was partly supported by the European Union FP7 programme through ERC grant number 320360. Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.