The Effect of Host Galaxies on Type Ia Supernovae in the SDSS-II Supernova Survey

TL;DR

This study analyzes how host galaxy types influence Type Ia Supernovae brightness and light curve properties, revealing significant correlations that could improve cosmological measurements.

Contribution

It provides new evidence linking host galaxy characteristics, such as stellar mass, to SN Ia brightness and color relationships, enhancing supernova standardization methods.

Findings

SNe Ia are brighter in passive host galaxies after standardization.

Strong correlation between host galaxy type and SN light curve width.

Including host galaxy stellar mass improves data fit.

Abstract

We present an analysis of the host galaxy dependencies of Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) from the full three year sample of the SDSS-II Supernova Survey. We rediscover, to high significance, the strong correlation between host galaxy typeand the width of the observed SN light curve, i.e., fainter, quickly declining SNe Ia favor passive host galaxies, while brighter, slowly declining Ia's favor star-forming galaxies. We also find evidence (at between 2 to 3 sigma) that SNe Ia are ~0.1 magnitudes brighter in passive host galaxies, than in star-forming hosts, after the SN Ia light curves have been standardized using the light curve shape and color variations: This difference in brightness is present in both the SALT2 and MCLS2k2 light curve fitting methodologies. We see evidence for differences in the SN Ia color relationship between passive and star-forming host galaxies, e.g., for the MLCS2k2 technique, we see that SNe Ia in passive hosts favor a dust law of R_V ~1, while SNe Ia in star-forming hosts require R_V ~2. The significance of these trends depends on the range of SN colors considered. We demonstrate that these effects can be parameterized using the stellar mass of the host galaxy (with a confidence of >4 sigma) and including this extra parameter provides a better statistical fit to our data. Our results suggest that future cosmological analyses of SN Ia samples should include host galaxy information.