Weak Lensing of Type Ia Supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of weak gravitational lensing on Type Ia Supernovae observations from the Dark Energy Survey, measuring correlation functions and skewness to constrain cosmological parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze weak lensing effects on supernovae that is insensitive to intrinsic brightness variations, providing new constraints on .

Findings

Estimated  from DES-SN: 1.2^{+0.9}_{-0.8}

Estimated  from JLA: 0.8^{+1.1}_{-0.7}

Homogeneity and improved data analysis enhance measurement precision.

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 $\sigma_8 = 1.2^{+0.9}_{-0.8}$. 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 $\sigma_8 = 0.8^{+1.1}_{-0.7}$. 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.