Future supernovae observations as a probe of dark energy

By Jochen Weller, A. A. U. O. Cambridge, U. Davis. 2001

271 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the potential impact of improved future supernovae data on our understanding of the dark energy problem. We carefully examine the relative utility of different fitting functions that can be used to parametrize the dark energy models, and provide concrete reasons why a particular choice (based on a parametrization of the equation of state) is better in almost all cases. We discuss the details of a representative sample of dark energy models and show how future supernova observations could distinguish among these. As a specific example, we consider the proposed ``SNAP'' satellite which is planned to observe around 2000 supernovae. We show how a SNAP-class data set taken alone would be a powerful discriminator among a family of models that would be approximated by a constant equation of state for the most recent epoch of cosmic expansion. We show how this family includes most of the dark energy models proposed so far. We then show how an independent measurement of ${\ensuremath{\Omega}}_{\mathrm{m}}$ can allow SNAP to probe the evolution of the equation of state as well, allowing further discrimination among a larger class of proposed dark energy models. We study the impact of the satellite design parameters on this method to distinguish the models and compare SNAP to alternative measurements. We establish that if we exploit the full precision of SNAP it provides a very powerful probe.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9bd97f22ac95798b94f34630ddabde7725aed94

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Citations in the corpus

Latest supernova data in the framework of the generalized Chaplygin gas model (2004, methodology): “The distribution of supernovae in each redshift bin is, as before, taken from Weller & Albrecht (2002), and shown in Table I. Summarizing, for each fiducial model, the method used, consists in the following (i) Choose a fiducial model.”
Smoothing supernova data to reconstruct the expansion history of the universe (2005, background): “However, it is well known that the presence of more degrees of freedom in the fit leads to a larger degeneracy (between parameters) and hence to larger errors of reconstruction (Weller & Albrecht 2002).”
The ESSENCE Supernova Survey: Survey Optimization, Observations, and Supernova Photometry (2007, methodology): “In general, the parameterization of dark energy in terms of w is a convenient and useful tool to compare a variety of models (Weller & Albrecht 2002).”
Exploring the expanding Universe and dark energy using the statefinder diagnostic (2003, methodology): “(39) c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 The ansatz (39) was examined in Weller & Albrecht (2002) who demonstrated that this approximation does not give an accurate reconstruction of the equation of state of dark energy.”
Cosmological parameters from supernova observations: A critical comparison of three data sets (2003, unknown): “…2001; Trentham 2001; Podariu, Nugent, & Ratra 2001; Corasaniti & Copeland 2002; Kujat et al. 2002; Minty, Heavens, & Hawkins 2002; Maor et al. 2002; Weller & Albrecht 2002; Gerke & Efstathiou 2002; Rowan-Robinson 2002; Linder & Jenkins 2003; Padmanabhan & Choudhury 2003; Visser 2004; Caresia,…”
Large‐scale cosmic microwave background anisotropies and dark energy (2003, background): “While large-scale CMB observations are limited by cosmic variance, the proposed Supernovae Acceleration Probe (SNAP) could fulfil this objective (Weller & Albrecht 2002).”
A Model-Independent Determination of the Expansion and Acceleration Rates of the Universe as a Function of Redshift and Constraints on Dark Energy (2003, background): “…use of supernovae to determine the properties of the dark energy (Starobinsky 1998; Huterer & Turner 1999; Saini et al. 2000; Chiba & Nakamura 2000; Maor, Brustein, & Steinhardt 2001; Goliath et al. 2001; Astier 2001; Gerke & Efstathiou 2002;Weller & Albrecht 2002; Padmanabhan & Choudhury 2002).”
The Essence of Quintessence and the Cost of Compression (2004, background): “The dark energy literature overflows with one, 2 two and higher-dimensional compressions of wDE(z), e.g. (Efstathiou 1999; Huterer and Turner 2001; Weller and Albrecht 2002; Bassett et al. 2002; Corasaniti and Copeland 2002; Linder 2003; Jassal et al. 2004).”
Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe (2008, unknown): “Although a variety of methods have been pursued (e.g., Gerke & Efstathiou 2002, Weller & Albrecht 2002), it appears that direct reconstruction is too challenging and not robust enough even with SNe Ia data of excellent quality.”
Is there supernova evidence for dark energy metamorphosis (2003, background): “Many different fits have been suggested in the literature (see for example Huterer & Turner 1999; Saini et al. 2000; Weller & Albrecht 2002; Gerke & Efstathiou 2002).”