Reconsidering the Effects of Local Star Formation On Type Ia Supernova Cosmology

TL;DR

This study investigates the impact of local star formation on Type Ia supernova measurements using an expanded dataset, finding minimal effects on supernova brightness and implications for cosmological parameters.

Contribution

It provides a larger, more refined analysis showing that local star formation has negligible influence on SN Ia brightness after light curve correction.

Findings

No significant brightness difference between star-forming and passive environments.

Reduced significance of previous correlations with larger sample size.

Sample selection criteria greatly affect local environment bias results.

Abstract

Recent studies found a correlation with $\sim$3 sigma significance between the local star formation measured by GALEX in Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) host galaxies and the distances or dispersions derived from these SNe. We search for these effects by using data from recent cosmological analyses to greatly increase the SN Ia sample; we include 179 GALEX-imaged SN Ia hosts with distances from the JLA and Pan-STARRS SN Ia cosmology samples and 157 GALEX-imaged SN Ia hosts with distances from the Riess et al. (2011) H$_0$ measurement. We find little evidence that SNe Ia in locally star-forming environments are fainter after light curve correction than SNe Ia in locally passive environments. We find a difference of only 0.000$\pm$0.018 (stat+sys) mag for SNe fit with SALT2 and 0.029$\pm$0.027 (stat+sys) mag for SNe fit with MLCS2k2 (R$_V$ = 2.5), which suggests that proposed changes to recent measurements of H$_0$ and w are not significant and numerically smaller than the parameter measurement uncertainties. We find the greatly reduced significance of these distance modulus differences compared to Rigault et al. (2013) and Rigault et al. (2015) result from two improvements with fairly equal effects, our larger sample size and the use of JLA and Riess et al. (2011) sample selection criteria. Without these improvements, we recover the results of Rigault et al. (2015). We find that both populations have more similar dispersion in distance than found by Rigault et al. (2013), Rigault et al. (2015), and Kelly et al. (2015), with slightly smaller dispersion for locally passive SNe Ia fit with MLCS, the opposite of the effect seen by Rigault et al. (2015) and Kelly et al. (2015). We caution that measuring local SNe Ia environments in the future may require a higher-resolution instrument than GALEX and that SN sample selection has a significant effect on local star formation biases.