Safety in Numbers: Gravitational Lensing Degradation of the Luminosity Distance-Redshift Relation

By D. Holz, Eric Linder. 2004

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Observation of the expansion history of the universe allows exploration of the physical properties and energy density of the universe's various constituents. Standardizable candles such as Type Ia supernovae remain one of the most promising and robust tools in this endeavor by allowing for a direct measure of the luminosity distance-redshift curve and thereby producing detailed studies of the dark energy responsible for the universe's currently accelerating expansion. As such observations are pushed to higher redshifts, the observed flux is increasingly affected by gravitational lensing magnification due to intervening structure along the line of sight. We simulate and analyze the non-Gaussian probability distribution function of deamplification and amplification due to lensing of standard candles, quantify the effect of a convolution over many independent sources (which acts to restore the intrinsic average [unlensed] luminosity due to flux conservation), and compute the additional uncertainty due to lensing on derived cosmological parameters. We find that, in the case of large numbers of sources, the lensing distribution along any particular line of sight can be approximated by a Gaussian with standard deviation given by σeff = 0.088z as a function of redshift z. The resulting "degradation factor" due to lensing is a factor of 3 reduction in the effective number of usable supernovae at z = 1.5 (for sources with intrinsic flux dispersion of 10%).

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ca95bc752f9c53536c0f03157088c29fbda09b5

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Citations in the corpus

Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, background): “A third complication, important for the high S/N observations expected from LISA, is that weak lensing magnification becomes a dominant source of noise at z & 1, inducing a scatter in distance of several percent per observed source (Markovic, 1993; Holz and Linder, 2005; Jonsson et al., 2007).”
The Hubble Diagram to Redshift >6 from 69 Gamma-Ray Bursts (2006, methodology): “Holz & Linder (2005) calculate that the effective rms of the scatter from lensing is roughly 0:093zmag up to z ¼ 2.”
SUPERNOVA CONSTRAINTS AND SYSTEMATIC UNCERTAINTIES FROM THE FIRST THREE YEARS OF THE SUPERNOVA LEGACY SURVEY (2011, background): “Substituting a different model for the intrinsic scatter, such as Holz & Linder (2005) (σ = 0.088z) has almost no effect because σint changes to compensate.”
SPECTRA AND HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE LIGHT CURVES OF SIX TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE AT 0.511 < z < 1.12 AND THE UNION2 COMPILATION (2010, methodology): “Gravitational lensing The effects from gravitational lensing on the Hubble diagram have been discussed in detail in the literature (Sasaki 1987; Linder 1988; Bergström et al. 2000; Amanullah et al. 2003; Holz & Linder 2005).”
Improved Cosmological Constraints from New, Old, and Combined Supernova Data Sets (2008, methodology): “Using the PDFs of Holz & Linder (2005) we have checked that the bias is never larger than 0:006zmag.”
Observational Constraints on the Nature of Dark Energy: First Cosmological Results from the ESSENCE Supernova Survey (2007, background): “When we add in the SNLS or Riess gold samples, we relax this constraint to incorporate those higher-redshift SNe Ia.”