Cosmology with Type Ia SN after the Nobel prize: level-up or game-over?
OKC colloquia
Tuesday 05 June 2012
from 13:15
to 14:15 at
FA32
Speaker :
Ariel Goobar (OKC)
Abstract :
The discovery of the accelerated expansion using Type Ia supernovae
completely changed our understanding of what the Universe is made of.
We now know that dark energy, the least theoretically understood
energy form, is the dominant component.
All attempts to find observational deviations from Einstein's
cosmological constant have been fruitless -so far. Given the current
constraints, future efforts to study the nature of dark energy will be
limited by systematic uncertainties. Distance measurements with Type
Ia SNe remain a very competitive cosmological probe, provided we can
address some of the outstanding astrophysical concerns: extinction by
dust and brightness evolution.
I plan to discuss ongoing efforts at OKC to break the degeneracy
between some of the potential sources of dimming/reddening of SNe Ia:
interstellar dust, circumstellar dust and intrinsic color
variations. Furthermore, I will present ideas on how to exploit
gravitational lensing of supernovae by galaxy clusters to do high S/N
spectroscopic studies of z~1.5 in the near-IR, an exciting path
to explore a potential change in SNIa properties with cosmic time.
