Precise Astronomical Flux Calibration and its Impact on Studying the Nature of Dark Energy

Abstract

Measurements of the luminosity of type Ia supernovae vs. redshift provided the original evidence for the accelerating expansion of the Universe and the existence of dark energy. Despite substantial improvements in survey methodology, systematic uncertainty in flux calibration dominates the error budget for this technique, exceeding both statistics and other systematic uncertainties. Consequently, any further collection of type Ia supernova data will fail to refine the constraints on the nature of dark energy unless we also improve the state of the art in astronomical flux calibration to the order of 1%. We describe how these systematic errors arise from calibration of instrumental sensitivity, atmospheric transmission, and Galactic extinction, and discuss ongoing efforts to meet the 1% precision challenge using white dwarf stars as celestial standards, exquisitely calibrated detectors as fundamental metrologic standards, and real-time atmospheric monitoring.

25 pages, 7 figures. Accepted Modern Physics Letters A

References in corpus (5)

• Supernova Constraints and Systematic Uncertainties from the First 3 Years of the Supernova Legacy Survey
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Cited by in corpus (13)

• The Pantheon+ Analysis: Cosmological Constraints
• Two transitional type~Ia supernovae located in the Fornax cluster member NGC 1404: SN 2007on and SN 2011iv
• Sub-percent Photometry: Faint DA White Dwarf Spectophotometric Standards for Astrophysical Observatories
• When flux standards go wild: white dwarfs in the age of Kepler
• The Gaia spectrophotometric standard stars survey -- IV. Results of the absolute photometry campaign
• How do Spitzer IRAC Fluxes Compare to HST CALSPEC
• A collimated beam projector for precise telescope calibration
• Photometry and spectroscopy of faint candidate spectrophotometric standard DA white dwarfs
• Perfecting our set of spectrophotometric standard DA white dwarfs
• DAmodel: Hierarchical Bayesian Modelling of DA White Dwarfs for Spectrophotometric Calibration
• A network of cooler white dwarfs as infrared standards for flux calibration
• Design and performance of a Collimated Beam Projector for telescope transmission measurement using a broadband light source
• Measurement of telescope transmission using a Collimated Beam Projector