Speaker
Description
Type Ia supernovae are a set of important cosmological objects that can be used as distance indicators. This is because their luminosity can be calibrated by applying some empirical corrections, which then allows us to compute their distance to us. One of these corrections is based on a color-luminosity relation, which is in part due to the effect interstellar dust has on the emitted light. This correction is usually obtained from a fit to a large population of supernovae and is thus assumed to be universal. However, it has been shown that dust properties can vary in the Universe and thus, by assuming a universal dust effect, we are committing a gross generalization, the impact of which is still unknown. The objective of this work is therefore to obtain the individual dust contributions for each element in a group of well known supernovae, which can be done by looking at photometric data for their host galaxies. We can then use these values to obtain new distance calibrations, allowing us to evaluate the impact of assuming a universal dust effect.
