The dependence of Type Ia Supernovae luminosities on their host galaxies

By Mark Sullivan, A. Conley, D. Howell, James D. Neill, P. Astier, C. Balland, S. Basa, R. Carlberg, D. Fouchez, J. Guy and 15 more. 2010

334 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Precision cosmology with Type la supernovae (SNe Ia) makes use of the fact that SN Ia luminosities depend on their light-curve shapes and colours. Using Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) and other data, we show that there is an additional dependence on the global characteristics of their host galaxies: events of the same light-curve shape and colour are, on average, 0.08 mag (similar or equal to 4.0 sigma) brighter in massive host galaxies (presumably metal-rich) and galaxies with low specific star formation rates (sSFR). These trends do not depend on any assumed cosmological model, and are independent of the SN light-curve width: both fast and slow-declining events show the same trends. SNe Ia in galaxies with a low sSFR also have a smaller slope ('beta') between their luminosities and colours with similar to 2.7 sigma significance, and a smaller scatter on SN la Hubble diagrams (at 95 per cent confidence), though the significance of these effects is dependent on the reddest SNe. SN Ia colours are similar between low-mass and high-mass hosts, leading us to interpret their luminosity differences as an intrinsic property of the SNe and not of some external factor such as dust. If the host stellar mass is interpreted as a metallicity indicator using galaxy mass-metallicity relations, the luminosity trends are in qualitative agreement with theoretical predictions. We show that the average stellar mass, and therefore the average metallicity, of our SN Ia host galaxies decreases with redshift. The SN la luminosity differences consequently introduce a systematic error in cosmological analyses, comparable to the current statistical uncertainties on parameters such as in, the equation of state of dark energy. We show that the use of two SN Ia absolute magnitudes, one for events in high-mass (metal-rich) galaxies and the other for events in low-mass (metal-poor) galaxies, adequately corrects for the differences. Cosmological fits incorporating these terms give a significant reduction in chi(2) (3.8 sigma-4.5 sigma); linear corrections based on host parameters do not perform as well. We conclude that all future SN la cosmological analyses should use a correction of this (or similar) form to control demographic shifts in the underlying galaxy population.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe02c31966793c98cf7a7b0b328d105327505668

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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2. L. Hernquist
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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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8. E. Berger

Citations in the corpus

• Large Magellanic Cloud Cepheid Standards Provide a 1% Foundation for the Determination of the Hubble Constant and Stronger Evidence for Physics beyond ΛCDM (2019, result): “…found a weaker (Scolnic et al. 2018) or absent (DES Collaboration et al. 2018) environmental dependance compared to past studies (Hicken et al. 2009; Kelly et al. 2010; Lampeitl et al. 2010; Sullivan et al. 2010), likely due to improved accounting for SN selection bias (Kessler & Scolnic 2017).”
• A 3% SOLUTION: DETERMINATION OF THE HUBBLE CONSTANT WITH THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE AND WIDE FIELD CAMERA 3 (2011, background): “The effect on H0 is quite small, a decrease of 0.75%, due to the modest difference in mean masses for the nearby hosts (Neill et al. 2009; mean log Mstellar = 10.0) and for those that define the magnitude–redshift relation (Sullivan et al. 2010; mean log Mstellar = 10.5).”
• The Carnegie Supernova Project: Absolute Calibration and the Hubble Constant (2018, methodology): “…term of equation 4 takes into account the correlation between the host galaxy stellar mass and intrinsic luminosity of its SN Ia (Neill et al. 2009; Sullivan et al. 2010; Kelly et al. 2010; Uddin et al. 2017) with αM being the slope of the correlation and M0 an arbitrary mass zero-point, which we…”
• TYPE Ia SUPERNOVA LIGHT CURVE INFERENCE: HIERARCHICAL MODELS IN THE OPTICAL AND NEAR-INFRARED (2010, background): “Observables that are not derived from light curve data, such as host galaxy masses (e.g., Kelly et al. 2010; Sullivan et al. 2010) or spectroscopic measurements (e.g., Bailey et al. 2009; Blondin et al. 2011; Foley & Kasen 2011), can be correlated with the intrinsic absolute light curves.”
• Type-Ia Supernova Rates and the Progenitor Problem: A Review (2011, background): “…Ni synthesized) on the age of the galaxy host – the oldest hosts, with little star formation, tend to host faint, low-stretch, SNe Ia, while star-forming galaxies more likely host bright-and-slow SNe Ia (e.g. Neill et al. 2009; Howell et al. 2009; Hicken et al. 2009; Sullivan et al. 2010).”
• First Cosmology Results using Type Ia Supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey: Constraints on Cosmological Parameters (2018, result): “Our α, β, and σint values are consistent with those found in previous analyses, while γ is smaller compared to those in Kelly et al. (2010); Sullivan et al. (2010); Lampeitl et al. (2010); Betoule et al. (2014); Scolnic et al. (2018).”
• On the Hubble Constant Tension in the SNe Ia Pantheon Sample (2021, methodology): “…tests include probing the relations between luminosity and the properties of the host galaxies of the SNe (Kelly et al. 2010; Lampeitl et al. 2010; Sullivan et al. 2010) and analysis of the light-curve fit parameters of SNe and how these parameters relate to luminosity (Kessler & Scolnic 2017).”
• The VISTA deep extragalactic observations (VIDEO) survey (2012, background): “…a key role in the cosmological analyses (Sullivan et al. 2011), will improve substantially when the optical DES data are used in conjunction with the deep VIDEO near-IR data, and aid in the determination of host galaxy stellar masses (Kelly et al. 2010; Lampeitl et al. 2010; Sullivan et al. 2010).”
• CONFIRMATION OF A STAR FORMATION BIAS IN TYPE Ia SUPERNOVA DISTANCES AND ITS EFFECT ON THE MEASUREMENT OF THE HUBBLE CONSTANT (2014, background): “…global or nuclear host-galaxy properties have been fruitful in revealing environmental dependencies that remain even after SNe Ia are standardized using their lightcurve widths and colors (e.g., Kelly et al. 2010; Sullivan et al. 2010; Lampeitl et al. 2010; Gupta et al. 2011; D’Andrea et al. 2011).”
• SUB-CHANDRASEKHAR WHITE DWARF MERGERS AS THE PROGENITORS OF TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE (2010, background): “The rates and properties of SN Ia depend on environment, with star-forming galaxies having higher rates of, on average, brighter SN Ia than passively evolving galaxies (e.g., Hamuy et al. 1995; Mannucci et al. 2005; Sullivan et al. 2010).”
• The Pantheon+ Analysis: Cosmological Constraints (2022, background): “…specific star formation rate (sSFR), stellar-population age, and metallicity have all been shown to correlate to varying degrees with the distance-modulus residuals after standardization (Lampeitl et al. 2010; Sullivan et al. 2010; Childress et al. 2013b; Rigault et al. 2013; Rose et al. 2019).”
• SNLS3: CONSTRAINTS ON DARK ENERGY COMBINING THE SUPERNOVA LEGACY SURVEY THREE-YEAR DATA WITH OTHER PROBES (2011, methodology): “There is also significant published information on the host galaxies (Sullivan et al. 2010), essential for the cosmological analysis and which is not available for other higher-redshift samples.”
• Improved cosmological constraints from a joint analysis of the SDSS-II and SNLS supernova samples (2014, methodology): “Kelly et al. (2010), Lampeitl et al. (2010b) and Sullivan et al. (2010) have found, in independent samples, a correlation between the shape and color corrected luminosities of type Ia supernovae and the stellar mass of their host galaxies (respectively for low-z, SDSS-II, and SNLS SNe).”
• SUPERNOVA CONSTRAINTS AND SYSTEMATIC UNCERTAINTIES FROM THE FIRST THREE YEARS OF THE SUPERNOVA LEGACY SURVEY (2011, background): “For systematic tests, instead of allowing M to vary based on host type, α and β might be allowed to differ between subsamples, as explored in Sullivan et al. (2010a); Lampeitl et al. (2010).”
• Measuring Dark Energy Properties with Photometrically Classified Pan-STARRS Supernovae. II. Cosmological Parameters (2017, background): “Host Galaxy Masses It has been shown that after shape and color correction, SNe Ia are ∼ 0.05-0.1 mag brighter in high mass host galaxies (log(M∗/M ) > 10) than in lower-mass host galaxies at the same redshifts (∆M ; Kelly et al. 2010; Lampeitl et al. 2010; Sullivan et al. 2010).”
• THE EFFECT OF HOST GALAXIES ON TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE IN THE SDSS-II SUPERNOVA SURVEY (2010, methodology): “We will explore these issues in the future with the full SDSS-II SN Survey similar to the recent analysis of Sullivan et al. (2010) for the SNLS.”
• COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS FROM MEASUREMENTS OF TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE DISCOVERED DURING THE FIRST 1.5 yr OF THE Pan-STARRS1 SURVEY (2013, background): “…et al. 2009; Foley & Kasen 2011; Foley et al. 2011), other spectral features (Foley et al. 2008; Bailey et al. 2009; Blondin et al. 2011; Silverman et al. 2012b; Foley & Kirshner 2013), and host galaxy properties (Kelly et al. 2010; Lampeitl et al. 2010; Sullivan et al. 2010; Hayden et al. 2012).”