|
|
|
|
|
Michael Childress |
|
|
|
Type Ia Supernovae are the best cosmological probes of the accelerating expansion of the Universe driven by Dark Energy, yet the source of their intrinsic luminosity dispersion remains mysterious. This dispersion is believed to be driven by diversity of the progenitor systems, and a key source for insight into this is the study of the galaxies in which SNe Ia occur. SN Ia brightness is known to correlate with host galaxy morphology, and work in the past year has demonstrated that SN Ia brightness is correlated with host galaxy mass AFTER standard light curve shape and color corrections. In this talk I will describe the supernova and host galaxy data set of the Nearby Supernova Factory, a wide-field untargeted search for SNe Ia in the low-redshift universe. Our collection of nearly 200 flux-calibrated spectral time series provides a large sample of nearby cosmological SNe Ia with a unique spectroscopic data set, and with our multiband photometry and spectroscopy of the host galaxies we have extended the range and types of host properties for Hubble-flow SNe Ia and are now exploring their relation to SN Ia diversity. |