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Supernovae, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Universe: the Status of the Cosmological Parameters

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Supernovae, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Universe: the Status of the Cosmological Parameters Supernovae, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Universe: The Status of the Cosmological Parameters Saul Perlmutter Supernova Cosmology Project Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Berkeley, CA 94720 1 Introduction I was asked to present the status of the cosmological parameters, and in partic- ular the status of the recent results concerning the accelerating universe—and the possible cosmological constant or dark energy that is responsible for the universe’s acceleration. This result comes most directly from the recent type Ia supernova work, so although I will mention a few of the approaches to the cos- mological parameters, I will emphasize the work with the type Ia supernovae. I will try to give you a sense of exactly how we reached the current conclusions and what the current level of confidence is in that conclusion. Because this presentation will be emphasizing the supernova work, I would like to highlight the strong team of scientists in our Supernova Cosmology Project [1, 2]; you will probably recognize some of the particle physics heritage of this particular team. I also would like to list the names of the members of the other supernova team, led by Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University, that has been working in this field [3]. These two groups together comprise a good fraction of the entire community of scientists working on supernovae. 2 Supernovae as a simple, direct cosmological measurement tool The particular advantage of the type Ia supernova approach to measuring the cosmological parameters is the fact that you can explain essentially the entire method in one graph. The basic idea is that you want to find an object of known brightness, a “standard candle," and then plot it on the astronomer’s Hubble diagram (Fig. 1), which is a plot of brightness (magnitude) against redshift. We 733 Saul Perlmutter Status of the Cosmological Parameters should interpret this graph as follows: for an object of known brightness, the fainter the object the farther away it is and the further back in time you are looking, so you can treat the y-axis as the time axis. The x-axis, the redshift, is a very direct measurement of the relative expansion of the universe, because as the universe expands the wavelengths of the photons travelling to us stretch exactly proportionately—and that is the redshift. Thus the Hubble diagram is showing you the “stretching" of the universe as a function of time. As you look farther and farther away, and further back in time, you can find the deviations in the expansion rate that are caused by the cosmological parameters. At a given time... 0.001 FAINTER Less redshift (Farther) = Slower expansion in past (Further back = Expansion is accelerating in time) = Less mass More redshift = Faster expansion in past = Expansion is slowing 0.01 = More mass 0.1 relative brightness “Nearby” Standard Candles 1.0 0.02 0.05 0.1 0.2 0.5 1.0 MORE REDSHIFT (More total expansion of universe since light left the Standard Candle) Figure 1: The Hubble plot: A history of the “size" of the Universe. In particular, you can think of making a measurement of a supernova explo- sion at one given time in history. If, for example, you found more redshift at that time than expected from the current expansion rate, that would imply that the expansion was faster in the past and has been slowing down. This would lead you to conclude that there was a higher mass density in the universe. 734 Saul Perlmutter Status of the Cosmological Parameters 3 Type Ia supernovae as ‘difficult’ standard candles: A strategy to make them manageable For a standard candle, we use the type Ia supernova, the brightest of the super- nova types. They brighten in just a few weeks and fade away within a few months, so it is necessary to explain what I mean here when I refer to this standard can- dle’s brightness. Generally, we will use the magnitude at peak, which turns out to be a very consistent brightness (after a bit of calibration, as discussed below). These are the brightest of the supernova explosion events by about a factor of six, so at high redshift most of the supernovae that we find are type Ia. Although such a bright, standard candle should make an excellent cosmolog- ical measurement tool, the problem with using the supernovae is that they turn out to be a real “pain in the neck” for any kind of research work: one can never predict a supernova explosion and supernovae only explode a couple of times per millennium in any given galaxy. This makes it very difficult to apply for the world’s largest telescopes, which are necessary to observe the most distant su- pernovae that exploded far back in time. Proposals for telescope time must be written six months in advance, and of course it is necessary to guarantee that there will be something to observe. The first steps of this project, then, involved developing the strategies to make it possible to guarantee the discovery of the supernovae. We came up with what is essentially a “batch" approach (see Fig. 2) [4]. We observe a number of wide fields of apparently empty sky, out of the plane of our Galaxy. If you open the shutter long enough, any patch of sky will have hundreds of distant galaxies in it. We observe tens of thousands of galaxies, in a few patches of sky, and then come back in three weeks to observe the same galaxies over again. In these tens of thousands of galaxies there will be a dozen to two dozen supernova explosions that were not there three weeks earlier. This is a new batch of supernovae that are ready to be followed up, and the photometry and spectroscopy observations can now be scheduled in advance to follow the supernovae as they brighten to peak and fade away. With this three-week time baseline, the supernovae generally do not have time to reach peak brightness, so almost all of the discoveries are pre-maximum. This guarantees that you can track the supernovae over maximum with scheduled follow-up observations. This strategy thus turns a rare, random event into something that can be studied in a systematic way. To make this a little more concrete, you can see what the actual data looks like in Fig. 3. All of the faintest specs and smudges in this picture are the distant galaxies that we are studying. We have to find a new spot of light among these tens of thousands of smudges that was not there three weeks before. As shown 735 Saul Perlmutter Status of the Cosmological Parameters Search Strategy Perlmutter et al. (1995) ... ... Fields R ... ~750 50–100 Scheduled Follow-Up Galaxies Photometry per flux Field λ Scheduled Follow-Up Spectroscopy flux RESULT: ~12 to 24 SNe Ia Discovered Before Maximum, at New Moon => Follow-up time Figure 2: Search strategy to discover “batches” of supernovae in a scheduled, systematic procedure [4]. in the blow-up figure, these are very minor-looking events, even though they are among the most dramatic, energetic events in the universe. With computer image analysis, however, we are able to find these events and trigger the sequence of follow up observations at telescopes around the world—and also at the Hubble Space Telescope. (To win time on the Hubble Space Telescope, not only do you have to predict the date of a new supernova discovery, but you also have to tell in advance which square degree of the sky will have the supernova in it.) This strategy turns out a batch of supernova every time we go out to the telescopes. We do this typically once per semester, and study one or two dozen events. By now, we have built up a sample at these very high redshifts of more than 80 supernovae. In the redshift distribution histogram (Fig. 4) the color coding indicates the search semester. You can see that we have found more and more each semester and worked our way out to higher and higher redshifts. The most recent supernovae have all been followed with the Hubble Space Telescope. 736 Saul Perlmutter Status of the Cosmological Parameters Figure 3: Supernova 1998ba, an example of a supernova discovery using the “batch approach.” 737 Saul Perlmutter Status of the Cosmological Parameters 81 Type Ia Supernovae Redshift Distribution Supernova Cosmology First 7 SNe Project Dec. 1995 SNe 14 13 Jan. 1997 SNe 12 Mar. 1996 SNe 11 10 9 NSN Hubble 8 Mar. 1997 SNe = Space HST Telescope 7 HST 6 5 Mar. 1998 4 Dec. 1997 SNe SNe HST 3 HST Oct. 2 HST HST 1998 HST HST HST SNe 1 HST HST HST HST 0 HST HST HST HST HST HST 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.50.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 1.1 1.2 Redshift Figure 4: The redshift distribution of the first 81 high-redshift supernovae discov- ered by the Supernova Cosmology Project. The label “HST” indicates supernovae that were followed with Hubble Space Telescope photometry. 738 Saul Perlmutter Status of the Cosmological Parameters 4 The (only) two other analysis steps needed Before this high-redshift supernova data can be plotted on the Hubble diagram and the cosmological parameters fitted, there are two small additional analysis steps necessary in order to compare the distant supernovae to the nearby super- novae on the same Hubble plot. First of all, although most type Ia supernovae follow a very similar light curve, there are a few outliers that are a little bit brighter or a little bit fainter.
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