Measuring the Hubble constant with Type Ia supernovae as near-infrared standard candles

By S. Dhawan, S. Jha, B. Leibundgut. 2017

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The most precise local measurements of $H_0$ rely on observations of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) coupled with Cepheid distances to SN Ia host galaxies. Recent results have shown tension comparing $H_0$ to the value inferred from CMB observations assuming $\Lambda$CDM, making it important to check for potential systematic uncertainties in either approach. To date, precise local $H_0$ measurements have used SN Ia distances based on optical photometry, with corrections for light curve shape and colour. Here, we analyse SNe Ia as standard candles in the near-infrared (NIR), where intrinsic variations in the supernovae and extinction by dust are both reduced relative to the optical. From a combined fit to 9 nearby calibrator SNe with host Cepheid distances from Riess et al. (2016) and 27 SNe in the Hubble flow, we estimate the absolute peak $J$ magnitude $M_J = -18.524\;\pm\;0.041$ mag and $H_0 = 72.8\;\pm\;1.6$ (statistical) $\pm$ 2.7 (systematic) km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$. The 2.2 $\%$ statistical uncertainty demonstrates that the NIR provides a compelling avenue to measuring SN Ia distances, and for our sample the intrinsic (unmodeled) peak $J$ magnitude scatter is just $\sim$0.10 mag, even without light curve shape or colour corrections. Our results do not vary significantly with different sample selection criteria, though photometric calibration in the NIR may be a dominant systematic uncertainty. Our findings suggest that tension in the competing $H_0$ distance ladders is likely not a result of supernova systematics that could be expected to vary between optical and NIR wavelengths, like dust extinction. We anticipate further improvements in $H_0$ with a larger calibrator sample of SNe Ia with Cepheid distances, more Hubble flow SNe Ia with NIR light curves, and better use of the full NIR photometric data set beyond simply the peak $J$-band magnitude.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/447765dab67f04dbd57631a8c6621e0a27ef8872

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. S. Vagnozzi
2. A. Riess
3. Ofer Lahav
4. P. Lemos
5. Paul Shah
6. A. Filippenko
7. S. Dhawan
8. Bharat Ratra

Citations in the corpus

• Hubble Parameter and Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Measurement Constraints on the Hubble Constant, the Deviation from the Spatially Flat ΛCDM Model, the Deceleration–Acceleration Transition Redshift, and Spatial Curvature (2017, background): “8 For earlier studies based on smaller H(z) compilations, see Busti et al. (2014); Wang & Meng (2017). lower H0 with larger error bars (Rigault et al. 2015; Fernández Arenas et al. 2017; Zhang et al. 2017; Dhawan et al. 2018).”
• New Parallaxes of Galactic Cepheids from Spatially Scanning the Hubble Space Telescope: Implications for the Hubble Constant (2018, methodology): “…of the red giant branch to reach SNIa hosts, when possible, produces changes of <0.5% for the same sources (Jang & Lee 2017; Jang et al. 2017), as does replacing SNIa distance estimates based on optical magnitudes with those relying on the dust-insensitive near-infrared (NIR; Dhawan et al. 2017).”
• A buyer’s guide to the Hubble constant (2021, methodology): “The host mass step is absent in the blue sample, and they suggest to use solely these in cosmological analyses to avoid bias (another possibility is to use nearinfrared photometry (Dhawan et al. 2018)).”
• The Carnegie Supernova Project: Absolute Calibration and the Hubble Constant (2018, unknown): “It is also consistent with a previous NIR determination of the Hubble constant by Dhawan et al. (2018), who found H0 = 72.8±3.1 km s−1 Mpc−1 and used CSP-I photometry as part of their sample.”
• Nonminimal dark sector physics and cosmological tensions (2019, unknown): “[30] S.”
• A Comprehensive Measurement of the Local Value of the Hubble Constant with 1 km s−1 Mpc−1 Uncertainty from the Hubble Space Telescope and the SH0ES Team (2021, unknown): “…of the R16 data with many variations were undertaken (Cardona et al. 2017; Feeney et al. 2019; Follin & Knox 2018; Bovy 2018; Burns et al. 2018; Dhawan et al. 2018; Avelino et al. 2019), resulting in H0 values 12 To improve readability, the conventional units of H0 will frequently be omitted…”
• Does the Hubble constant tension call for new physics? (2018, result): “Recent reanalyses of the data in [18] confirm the insensitivity of H0 to Cepheids systematics [20], SNe Ia [21] and the model for fitting the data [22], substantiating the possibility that the tension is due to non-standard physics.”