Progenitor age-bias-corrected Type Ia supernovae favor a logarithmic luminosity-distance relation

Abstract

Type Ia supernovae provide one of the principal observational probes of late-time cosmic acceleration. Recently, Son et al. [MNRAS 544, 975 (2025)] proposed that correlations between SNe Ia luminosity and progenitor age could introduce a systematic bias in the inferred luminosities, leading to revised distance moduli in the Pantheon+ and DES-SN5YR compilations. Motivated by this possibility, we test whether the age-bias-corrected SNe Ia Hubble diagrams comply with the luminosity-distance relation $d_L=c/H_0(1+z)\ln (1+z)$. We find that this one-parameter logarithmic relation provides a high-quality description of both datasets, with the Hubble constant $H_0$ as its sole free parameter. For Pantheon+ and DES separately, the relation yields lower ${\chi }^2$ values than the two-parameter flat $\Lambda$CDM, with $\Delta {\chi }^2=12.0$ and $2.1$, respectively. A joint likelihood analysis of both datasets yields $\Delta {\chi }^2=17.1$, corresponding to $(\Delta \text{AIC},\Delta \text{BIC})=(19.1,25.2)$ in favor of the logarithmic relation. We further find that, after the age-bias correction, neither dataset requires higher-order corrections to the relation, whereas the Einstein-de Sitter cosmology is firmly rejected. These results indicate that the closed-form relation $d_L=c/H_0(1+z)\ln (1+z)$ provides a viable one-parameter description of progenitor age-bias-corrected SNe Ia Hubble diagrams. Its asymptotic behavior $d_L\propto z\ln z$ naturally accounts for the excess distance moduli observed at high redshift. Should the progenitor age-bias correction be confirmed, the logarithmic relation can be stringently tested using larger samples of SNe Ia within $1\lesssim z\lesssim 2$, where it already departs markedly from flat $\Lambda$CDM.

8 pages, 4 figures. Typos corrected