Weak lensing of Type Ia Supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey

Macaulay, E.; Bacon, D.; Nichol, R. C.; Davis, T. M.; Elvin-Poole, J.; Brout, D.; Carollo, D.; Glazebrook, K.; Hinton, S. R.; Lewis, G. F.; Lidman, C.; Moller, A.; Sako, M.; Scolnic, D.; Smith, M.; Sommer, N. E.; Tucker, B. E.; Abbott, T. M. C.; Aguena, M.; Annis, J.; Avila, S.; Bertin, E.; Bhargava, S.; Brooks, D.; Burke, D. L.; Rosell, A. Carnero; Kind, M. Carrasco; Carretero, J.; Castander, F. J.; Costanzi, M.; Da Costa, L. N.; Desai, S.; Diehl, H. T.; Doel, P.; Flaugher, B.; Foley, R. J.; Garcia-Bellido, J.; Gaztanaga, E.; Gerdes, D. W.; Gruen, D.; Gruendl, R. A.; Gschwend, J.; Gutierrez, G.; Hollowood, D. L.; Honscheid, K.; Huterer, D.; James, D. J.; Kuehn, K.; Kuropatkin, N.; Lahav, O.; Lima, M.; Maia, M. A. G.; Marshall, J. L.; Melchior, P.; Menanteau, F.; Miquel, R.; Palmese, A.; Plazas, A. A.; Romer, A. K.; Roodman, A.; Sanchez, E.; Scarpine, V.; Schubnell, M.; Serrano, S.; Sevilla-Noarbe, I.; Soares-Santos, M.; Suchyta, E.; Swanson, M. E. C.; Tarle, G.; Varga, T. N.; Walker, A. R.; Weller, J. (2020): Weak lensing of Type Ia Supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey. In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 496, No. 3: pp. 4051-4059

Abstract

We consider the effects of weak gravitational lensing on observations of 196 spectroscopically confirmed Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) from years 1 to 3 of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We simultaneously measure both the angular correlation function and the non-Gaussian skewness caused by weak lensing. This approach has the advantage of being insensitive to the intrinsic dispersion of SNe Ia magnitudes. We model the amplitude of both effects as a function of sigma(8), and find sigma(8) =1.2(-0.8)(+0.9). We also apply our method to a subsample of 488 SNe from the Joint Light-curve Analysis (JLA;chosen to match the redshift range we use for this work), and find sigma(8) =0.8(-0.7)(+1.1). The comparable uncertainty in sigma(8) between DES-SN and the larger number of SNe from JLA highlights the benefits of homogeneity of the DES-SN sample, and improvements in the calibration and data analysis.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Physics
• Subjects: 500 Science > 530 Physics
• ISSN: 0035-8711
• Language: English