The Changing Fractions of Type Ia Supernova NUV-Optical Subclasses with Redshift

TL;DR

This study investigates the evolution of UV-optical color subclasses of Type Ia supernovae with redshift, revealing a shift in dominant groups and implications for cosmological measurements.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the NUV-blue group becomes dominant at higher redshifts and explores spectral and velocity differences between subclasses, impacting distance estimates.

Findings

NUV-blue supernovae dominate at higher redshifts.

Velocity differences between subclasses are about 12%.

Color-based extinction estimates may be biased, affecting cosmological parameters.

Abstract

UV and optical photometry of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) at low redshift have revealed the existence of two distinct color groups, NUV-red and NUV-blue events. The color curves differ primarily by an offset, with the NUV-blue u- color curves bluer than the NUV-red curves by 0.4 mag. For a sample of 23 low-z SNe~Ia observed with Swift, the NUV-red group dominates by a ratio of 2:1. We compare rest-frame UV/optical spectrophotometry of intermediate and high-z SNe Ia with UVOT photometry and HST spectrophotometry of low-z SNe Ia, finding that the same two color groups exist at higher-z, but with the NUV-blue events as the dominant group. Within each red/blue group, we do not detect any offset in color for different redshifts, providing insight into how SN~Ia UV emission evolves with redshift. Through spectral comparisons of SNe~Ia with similar peak widths and phase, we explore the wavelength range that produces the UV/OPT color differences. We show that the ejecta velocity of NUV-red SNe is larger than that of NUV-blue objects by roughly 12% on average. This velocity difference can explain some of the UV/optical color difference, but differences in the strengths of spectral features seen in meanspectra require additional explanation. Because of the different b-v colors for these groups, NUV-red SNe will have their extinction underestimated using common techniques. This, in turn, leads to under-estimation of the optical luminosity of the NUV-blue SNe~Ia, in particular, for the high-redshift cosmological sample. Not accounting for this effect should thus produce a distance bias that increases with redshift and could significantly bias measurements of cosmological parameters.