Type Ia Supernovae As Not-Quite-So-Standard Cosmological Candles 33
Shag writes "Type Ia supernovae are used as cosmological 'standard candles' to measure distance because of their strong similarity to one another. This has made possible, for example, the research into universal expansion that led to the Nobel-winning discovery of 'dark energy.' For years, astrophysicists believed white dwarves exploded when they accreted enough mass from companion stars to reach a limit of 1.38 times the mass of our Sun. A decade ago, the 'Champagne supernova' (SN 2003fg) was so bright astrophysicists concluded the limit had been exceeded by two white dwarves colliding. Now a new paper (PDF) from the Nearby Supernova Factory collaboration suggests that type Ia supernovae occur at a wider range of stellar masses. Fortunately, there appears to be a calculable correlation between mass and light-curve width, so they can still fill the 'standard candle' role, and research based on them is probably still valid. (I took data for the paper, but am not an author.)"
Reassuring (Score:2)
research based on them is probably still valid
That's probably reassuring.
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If you don't end your paper with "Further research is needed" a secret cabal of other researchers also applying for grants in your field come into your bedroom at night, drag you off, and tie you to a post in the beam of the LHC.
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I thought "Further research is needed" was code for "we have seventeen more papers in the works, all of which will cite this one and each of the others, thus inflating our g-index and h-index numbers."
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I thought "Further research is needed" was code for "we have seventeen more papers in the works, all of which will cite this one and each of the others, thus inflating our g-index and h-index numbers."
No, tha's the difference between researchers and teh political types. Research only raises more questions, and politicians know all the answers before any research is done.
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come into your bedroom at night, drag you off, and tie you to a post in the beam of the LHC
They would do anything for their large hardons, wouldn't they?
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That's why astrophysicists concentrate on the sky instead.
so how far off is this? (Score:3)
Our entire understanding of how the universe works is largly based on these measurements... so this is potentially a very big deal. Any Astrophysicists around that can give us an idea of how big a difference this will make?
Re:so how far off is this? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think it's going to make a difference. In fact, I'm not quite sure whether the dark energy research that got the Nobel was strictly limited to type Ia supernovae - it was before my time, and since they were using high-Z (very distant) supernovae, they might have wanted more massive type II ones, or something.
For about a decade, people have accepted that some SNe Ia are "over the limit" (under arrest!) and have developed "double-degenerate" models of colliding white dwarf stars. As sky surveys discover more and more, it's started to become apparent that there are also some "under the limit." This project has studied hundreds of supernovae over the last decade, and looked pretty closely at how they evolve over time. The reassuring part of the paper is that even though these supernovae are nowhere near all the same mass blowing up every time, they're still within a reasonably sensible range (0.9 to 1.4 solar masses) and that by watching what brightness they reach at their peaks, and how quickly they decline in brightness, and looking at their spectral curves (all of which are among the things that this particular collaboration looks at), astrophysicists can calculate their masses, and thus make any necessary adjustments to compensate for that. And by the standards of astrophysicists and cosmologists, the math required to "standardize" progenitors of different masses is probably considered "easy." Of course, these are the same people who think "nearby" means 0.4-1.0 billion light years away...
Disclaimer: I am not an astrophysicist of any kind. I got involved in astronomy a decade ago, and took a few classes 5 years ago, but my roles are overwhelmingly technical or operations, and when it comes to science, I am always the "village idiot" surrounded by PhD's. I'm not the guy who'll give a lecture about what the telescope's pointing at - I'm the guy who'll fix the telescope so it points at it in the first place. I'll take data - in this particular case, over a 10-year project, I'll probably rank #1 or #2 in terms of amount of time spent taking data - but I don't do the analysis or write the papers. My background was in things like systems administration, spamfighting, web development, etc., as one would expect of someone with my user number here.
Re:so how far off is this? (Score:5, Informative)
" In fact, I'm not quite sure whether the dark energy research that got the Nobel was strictly limited to type Ia supernovae..."
No, they were definitely intended to be SN1a.
Riess et al.: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/... [arxiv.org]
"We present observations of 10 type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia)..."
Perlmutter et al.: http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/astro-... [arxiv.org]
"...All SN peak magnitudes are standardized using a SN Ia lightcurve width-luminosity relation..."
The reason is that SN1a can be standardised -- although that's an empirical (i.e. phenomenological) relationship rather than a theoretical one, it seems to be basically robust, as this paper has demonstrated -- and therefore used as standard candles. Other types of supernovae can not be used in the same way; one cannot necessarily correlate a (corrected) brightness against a (corrected) redshift.
This doesn't say that samples aren't contaminated by supernovae that aren't actually Type 1a (and a few years back an explanation for tension between the so-called "Gold sample" and other datasets was that it may have been more contaminated), but the intention is to only look at Type 1as.
I'd also argue that they weren't particularly high redshift, but then for me a redshift of 3 or 4 is very much low redshift. Come to that, redshifts of 300 are low redshift.
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for me a redshift of 3 or 4 is very much low redshift. Come to that, redshifts of 300 are low redshift.
Just as long as you don't claim things are "nearby." Even at the redshifts we deal with (0.03-0.08), you can't get a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less.
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At redshifts of 0.03-0.08 you can hardly see the Hubble flow, man!
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Actually, you can also use type IIP supernovae (the explosions of stars 8-15 times the mass of our Sun, when their cores collapse). It's part of what Brian Schmidt did his Ph.D. thesis on at Harvard!
Schmidt et al.: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994ApJ...432...42S
"We have used observations gathered at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) to measure distances by the expanding photosphere method (EPM) to five Type II supernovae."
For more current work see Nugent et al.: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/a
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Mod points anyone still reading this thread please - this is very interesting stuff.
I must admit to my shame that using supernovae type II for distance measurements hasn't really been on my radar at all, although I must have been in quite a few talks discussing it. Anything that can add redundant checks to the distance ladder absolutely has to be pursued.
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SN1a are only one of the tools astronomers use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The small distance measures have to match with the medium ones and those again with the largest distance measuring tools. Also on the same level, they should agree.
The benefit of SN1a is that they are abundant, and their method seems to have particularly small systematic uncertainties. Other methods for computing distances are for instance Baryonic acoustic oscillations, which also provide a scale.
This is the Phillips relation - known for 20 years (Score:5, Informative)
Mmm... press release spin.
There is good science here, but it is being heavily spun. The relation between light curve width and how bright SN are has been known since at least 1993 (Phillips, M., 1993, ApJ 413, L105). This was corrected for even in the original work that won the Nobel prize. So, the 'they aren't quite so standard candles' has been known for 20 years - what they are is 'standardizable' candles.
What is interesting about this work is that the SNFactory has tried to find a link between the Phillips relation and physical properties of the explosion - in this case the ejected Nickel 56 mass. And that is very interesting from a SN physics perspective, if not really so much from the 'doing cosmology with Type Ia Supernovae' one.
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Hello! I read the same press release, but I don't see the SuperNova Factory taking credit for discovering the relationship between light curve width and luminosity (the Phillips relation, which is indeed well-known, and made the discovery of Dark Energy with Type Ia supernovae possible). So if there is any spin here, it's not on that axis. The press release even acknowledges standardization to about 10% in distance.
Rather, the paper is about explaining this relationship in terms of the underlying physics
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AC1:
The relation between light curve width and how bright SN are has been known since at least 1993 (Phillips, M., 1993, ApJ 413, L105). This was corrected for even in the original work that won the Nobel prize. So, the 'they aren't quite so standard candles' has been known for 20 years - what they are is 'standardizable' candles.
AC2:
I don't see the SuperNova Factory taking credit for discovering the relationship between light curve width and luminosity (the Phillips relation, which is indeed well-known, and made the discovery of Dark Energy with Type Ia supernovae possible).
Well... the Phillips Relationship is "well-known" in much the same way that these supernovae are "nearby" - to the people in that specific very narrow field of expertise. Yes, Wikipedia has an article on it, but I'd expect it to be unknown to the average adult walking down the street, the average amateur astronomer, the average Jeopardy contestant, the average undergraduate or first-year graduate astronomy student, or even the average science popularizer who isn't specifically dealing with supernovae. Just
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Hi all, I'm the lead author on the paper who got linked here by a colleague. I agree the Phillips relation is very well-known and well-established *empirically*, and that it is not endangered, nor is my boss going to have to give back his Nobel Prize because we found this out. But understanding this well-known empirical relation theoretically, from first principles, is a real challenge, and it's part of what's preventing us from further improving their performance as "standard candles". We need to contin
Talks at Google (Score:1)
Best guess (Score:1)
Most astronomy and astrophysics is best guess under ideal circumstances... Some of the guesses are very good indeed though. Dark energy is just an "x" variable in our mathematical understanding of gravity and space-time. Calling it (dark stuff) a 'discovery' is a bit misleading, as it hasn't actually been, it's only been added as a placeholder! I believe it might be the result of a combination of error terms in the measurements that aren't yet known and a time-geometry, space and time might knot be flat fol
And there could be several explainations. (Score:2)
Ouch! (Score:2)
(I took data for the paper, but am not an author.)
It's pretty sad when the 35 authors can take paper space acknowledge the culturally significant role that the observatory site has for the indigenous Hawaiians, but can't specifically acknowledge the people who took the data.
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It's pretty sad when the 35 authors can take paper space acknowledge the culturally significant role that the observatory site has for the indigenous Hawaiians, but can't specifically acknowledge the people who took the data.
Uh, they can, and they did, but you'd have to read the remainder of the paragraph to discover that - and for some reason, they don't refer to me by my Slashdot username. ;) Occasionally I'll also proofread papers (I know more about English than astrophysics or cosmology) and get thanked for that, too.
The author list for peer-reviewed stuff is mostly full members of the collaboration - folks with Ph.D's, folks doing their Ph.D's on collaboration stuff, folks who wrote the custom data warehouse software, and