Type Ia Supernovae Are Good Standard Candles in the Near Infrared: Evidence from PAIRITEL

By W. Michael Wood-Vasey, A. Friedman, Joshua S. Bloom, M. Hicken, Maryam Modjaz, R. Kirshner, D. Starr, C. Blake, Emilio E. Falco, A. Szentgyorgyi and 6 more. 2007

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We have obtained 1087 NIR (JHKs) measurements of 21 SNe Ia using PAIRITEL, nearly doubling the number of well-sampled NIR SN Ia light curves. These data strengthen the evidence that SNe Ia are excellent standard candles in the NIR, even without correction for optical light-curve shape. We construct fiducial NIR templates for normal SNe Ia from our sample, excluding only the three known peculiar SNe Ia: SN 2005bl, SN 2005hk, and SN 2005ke. The H-band absolute magnitudes in this sample of 18 SNe Ia have an intrinsic rms of only 0.15 mag with no correction for light-curve shape. We found a relationship between the H-band extinction and optical color excess of AH = 0.2E(B − V) . This variation is as small as the scatter in distance modulus measurements currently used for cosmology based on optical light curves after corrections for light-curve shape. Combining the homogeneous PAIRITEL measurements with 23 SNe Ia from the literature, these 41 SNe Ia have standard H-band magnitudes with an rms scatter of 0.16 mag. The good match of our sample with the literature sample suggests there are few systematic problems with the photometry. We present a nearby NIR Hubble diagram that shows no correlation of the residuals from the Hubble line with light-curve properties. Future samples that account for optical and NIR light-curve shapes, absorption, spectroscopic variation, or host-galaxy properties may reveal effective ways to improve the use of SNe Ia as distance indicators. Since systematic errors due to dust absorption in optical bands remain the leading difficulty in the cosmological use of supernovae, the good behavior of SN Ia NIR light curves and their relative insensitivity to reddening make these objects attractive candidates for future cosmological work.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e61dfb98b6c322e72084a080b207ff1ebc8c166b

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Citations in the corpus

• High luminosity, slow ejecta and persistent carbon lines: SN 2009dc challenges thermonuclear explosion scenarios (2010, background): “It does not follow the behaviour of normal SNe Ia, which are nearly standard candles in the NIR (with MJHK ′ ∼ −18.1 to −18.3; Krisciunas, Phillips & Suntzeff 2004; Wood-Vasey et al. 2008).”
• CfA4: LIGHT CURVES FOR 94 TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE (2012, background): “Also, due to the reasonable consistency of the BV r ′i ′ CfA3 and CfA4 period-one color coefficients, the C12 post-bakeout passbands can be used with the CfA3 natural-system light curves.”
• CfA3: 185 TYPE Ia SUPERNOVA LIGHT CURVES FROM THE CfA (2009, background): “These near-infrared SN Ia light curves stand on their own as standard candles (Wood-Vasey et al. 2008) and, when 27 http://www.pairitel.org/ combined with the optical data, will help clarify the properties of host-galaxy dust and intrinsic color variation of SNe Ia (A. Friedman et al. 2009, in…”
• OBSERVATIONS OF THE NAKED-EYE GRB 080319B: IMPLICATIONS OF NATURE'S BRIGHTEST EXPLOSION (2008, unknown): “With no shutter, the standard reductions necessarily incorporate per-pixel models of the combined detector dark current and sky flux fitted over time (Wood-Vasey et al. 2008).”
• The VISTA deep extragalactic observations (VIDEO) survey (2012, background): “…J, H photometry at z < 0.03 show some evidence for this, indicating that SNe Ia are equally good standard candles at these wavelengths (peak dispersion <0.15 mag) and have no apparent correlation with optical light-curve post-peak decline rate (Wood-Vasey et al. 2008; Barone-Nugent et al. 2012).”
• THE CARNEGIE SUPERNOVA PROJECT: ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST SAMPLE OF LOW-REDSHIFT TYPE-Ia SUPERNOVAE (2009, methodology): “Again, the results in J and H are consistent with those of Wood-Vasey et al. (2008) at only the ∼1–2σ level.”
• DETONATIONS IN SUB-CHANDRASEKHAR-MASS C+O WHITE DWARFS (2010, result): “This is consistent with observations – normal SNe Ia show double-peaked near-infrared light curves while subluminous events have single maxima (e.g. Wood-Vasey et al. 2008).”
• THE CARNEGIE SUPERNOVA PROJECT: FIRST PHOTOMETRY DATA RELEASE OF LOW-REDSHIFT TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE (2009, result): “A distinguishing aspect of the CSP is the quantity and quality of the near-infrared photometry, which is matched only by the recently published PAIRITEL results (Wood-Vasey et al. 2008).”
• Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, background): “Finally, the last five years have also seen major efforts to expand the sample of local calibrators and improve their measurements, including rest-frame IR and rest-frame UV photometry (Wood-Vasey et al., 2008; Stritzinger et al., 2011; Contreras et al., 2010; Hicken et al., 2009a).”
• A PANCHROMATIC VIEW OF THE RESTLESS SN 2009ip REVEALS THE EXPLOSIVE EJECTION OF A MASSIVE STAR ENVELOPE (2013, methodology): “PAIRITEL data were processed with a single mosaicking pipeline that co-adds and registers PAIRITEL raw images into mosaics (see Wood-Vasey et al. 2008; Friedman 2012).”
• FROM SHOCK BREAKOUT TO PEAK AND BEYOND: EXTENSIVE PANCHROMATIC OBSERVATIONS OF THE TYPE Ib SUPERNOVA 2008D ASSOCIATED WITH SWIFT X-RAY TRANSIENT 080109 (2008, methodology): “We performed difference photometry (following Wood-Vasey et al. 2008) using the image-subtraction algorithm of Alard & Lupton (1998), similar to our optical photometry.”
• THE CARNEGIE SUPERNOVA PROJECT: SECOND PHOTOMETRY DATA RELEASE OF LOW-REDSHIFT TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE (2010, background): “The light curves presented here are a significant addi- tion to a growing sample of low-z SNe Ia that have been observed in well-understood and stable photometric systems (Wood-Vasey et al. 2008; Hicken et al. 2009; Contreras et al. 2010; Ganeshalingam et al. 2010).”
• THE CARNEGIE SUPERNOVA PROJECT: LIGHT-CURVE FITTING WITH SNooPy (2010, methodology): “It is well known that the decline-rate corrections for SNe Ia are largest in the ultra- violet bands (where the correction can be as high as 0.5 mag), decrease steadily through the optical bands, and are almost non-existent in the NIR bands (Krisciunas et al. 2004; Wood-Vasey et al. 2008).”
• SN 2008ha: AN EXTREMELY LOW LUMINOSITY AND EXCEPTIONALLY LOW ENERGY SUPERNOVA (2009, methodology): “For the NIR photometry, we used the imageanalysis pipeline of the ESSENCE and SuperMACHO projects and performed difference photometry (following Wood-Vasey et al. 2008) using the image-subtraction algorithm of Alard (2000).”
• Measuring the Hubble constant with Type Ia supernovae as near-infrared standard candles (2017, methodology): “We have ascribed our dominant systematic uncertainty to photometric calibration of the J-band data, as evidenced by the difference in Hubble-flow intercepts from CSP and CfA, and perhaps the increased scatter in the calibrator sample (which has more heterogeneous photometric sources).”
• OPTICAL SPECTRA OF 73 STRIPPED-ENVELOPE CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVAE (2014, methodology): “Infrared observations of Type Ia supernovae from the CfA are available in Wood-Vasey et al. (2008) and in A. S. Friedman et al. (in preparation).”