Assessment of the Systematic Uncertainties in the Cosmological Analysis of the SDSS Supernovae Photometric Sample

Abstract

Improvement in the precision of measurements of cosmological parameters with Type Ia Supernovae (SNIa) is expected to come from large photometrically identified (photometric) SN samples. Here we re-analyse the SDSS photometric SN sample, with roughly 700 high-quality, likely but unconfirmed SNIa light-curves, to develop new analysis tools aimed at evaluating systematic uncertainties on the dark energy equation-of-state parameter $w$. Since we require a spectroscopically measured host galaxy redshift for each SN, we determine the associated selection efficiency of host galaxies in order to simulate bias corrections. We determine that the mis-association rate of host galaxies is $0.6\%$; ignoring this effect in simulated bias corrections leads to a $w$-bias of $\Delta w=+0.0007$, where $w$ is evaluated from SNIa and priors from measurements of baryon acoustic oscillations and the cosmic microwave background. We assess the uncertainty in our modeling of the host galaxy selection efficiency and find the associated $w$ uncertainty to be $-0.0072$. Finally, we explore new core collapse (CC) models in simulated training samples and find that adjusting the CC luminosity distribution to be in agreement with previous Pan-STARRS analyses yields a better match to the SDSS data. The impact of ignoring this adjustment is $\Delta w=-0.0109$; the impact of replacing the new CC models with those used by Pan-STARRS is $\Delta w=-0.0028$. These systematic uncertainties are subdominant to the statistical constraints from the SDSS sample, but must be considered in future photometric analyses of large SN samples such as those from DES, LSST and WFIRST.

References in corpus (54)

• Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant
• Measurements of Omega and Lambda from 42 High-Redshift Supernovae
• Planck 2015 results. XIII. Cosmological parameters
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary
• Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Cosmological Interpretation
• First Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Preliminary Maps and Basic Results
• Detection of the Baryon Acoustic Peak in the Large-Scale Correlation Function of SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies
• LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products
• The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III
• Improved cosmological constraints from a joint analysis of the SDSS-II and SNLS supernova samples
• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Data Release 10 and 11 galaxy samples
• A method for optimal image subtraction
• Supernova Constraints and Systematic Uncertainties from the First 3 Years of the Supernova Legacy Survey
• First-year Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II (SDSS-II) Supernova Results: Hubble Diagram and Cosmological Parameters
• Galaxy And Mass Assembly: Stellar Mass Estimates
• The Supernova Legacy Survey 3-year sample: Type Ia Supernovae photometric distances and cosmological constraints
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey: Technical Summary
• SNLS3: Constraints on Dark Energy Combining the Supernova Legacy Survey Three Year Data with Other Probes
• The Dependence of Type Ia Supernova Luminosities on their Host Galaxies
• SNANA: A Public Software Package for Supernova Analysis
• The Effect of Host Galaxies on Type Ia Supernovae in the SDSS-II Supernova Survey
• First Cosmology Results using Type Ia Supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey: Constraints on Cosmological Parameters
• Correcting Type Ia Supernova Distances for Selection Biases and Contamination in Photometrically Identified Samples
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey: Search Algorithm and Follow-up Observations
• MOSFiT: Modular Open-Source Fitter for Transients
• The Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II: Photometry and Supernova Ia Light Curves from the 2005 data
• Photometric Supernova Classification With Machine Learning
• SuperNNova: an open-source framework for Bayesian, Neural Network based supernova classification
• Supernova Simulations and Strategies For the Dark Energy Survey
• Results from the Supernova Photometric Classification Challenge
• Measuring Dark Energy Properties with Photometrically Classified Pan-STARRS Supernovae. II. Cosmological Parameters
• Photometric SN Ia Candidates from the Three-Year SDSS-II SN Survey Data
• Models and Simulations for the Photometric LSST Astronomical Time Series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC)
• Should Type Ia Supernova Distances be Corrected for their Local Environments?
• Improved Constraints on Type Ia Supernova Host Galaxy Properties using Multi-Wavelength Photometry and their Correlations with Supernova Properties
• Comprehensive Observations of the Bright and Energetic Type Iax SN 2012Z: Interpretation as a Chandrasekhar Mass White Dwarf Explosion
• Cosmology with Photometrically-Classified Type Ia Supernovae from the SDSS-II Supernova Survey
• Measuring Type Ia Supernova Populations of Stretch and Color and Predicting Distance Biases
• Host Galaxy Identification for Supernova Surveys
• Testing Models of Intrinsic Brightness Variations in Type Ia Supernovae, and their Impact on Measuring Cosmological Parameters
• Bayesian Estimation Applied to Multiple Species: Towards cosmology with a million supernovae
• Theoretical Models of Optical Transients. I. A Broad Exploration of the Duration-Luminosity Phase Space
• The type Iax supernova, SN 2015H: a white dwarf deflagration candidate
• Type Iax Supernovae
• How Many Kilonovae Can Be Found in Past, Present, and Future Survey Datasets?
• The Fundamental Metallicity Relation Reduces Type Ia SN Hubble Residuals More Than Host Mass Alone
• Extending Supernova Spectral Templates for Next-Generation Space Telescope Observations
• Photometric Supernova Cosmology with BEAMS and SDSS-II
• The Effect of Weak Lensing on Distance Estimates from Supernovae
• SDSS-II Supernova Survey: An Analysis of the Largest Sample of Type Ia Supernovae and Correlations with Host-Galaxy Spectral Properties
• First Cosmology Results Using Type Ia Supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey: Effects of Chromatic Corrections to Supernova Photometry on Measurements of Cosmological Parameters
• zBEAMS: A unified solution for supernova cosmology with redshift uncertainties
• Extending BEAMS to incorporate correlated systematic uncertainties

Cited by in corpus (8)

• The Pantheon+ Analysis: Evaluating Peculiar Velocity Corrections in Cosmological Analyses with Nearby Type Ia Supernovae
• The Young Supernova Experiment: Survey Goals, Overview, and Operations
• Improved Treatment of Host-Galaxy Correlations in Cosmological Analyses With Type Ia Supernovae
• Supernova Host Galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey: I. Deep Coadds, Photometry, and Stellar Masses
• The Dark Energy Survey Supernova Program: Modelling selection efficiency and observed core collapse supernova contamination
• Measuring Cosmological Parameters with Type Ia Supernovae in redMaGiC galaxies
• A Synthetic Roman Space Telescope High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey: Supernovae in the Deep Field
• ZTF SN Ia DR2: Evidence of Changing Dust Distributions With Redshift Using Type Ia Supernovae