USNAC is an ERC Starting Grant project hosted by the IN2P3 that aims at solving the problem of astrophysical biases in the measurement of cosmological parameters using Type Ia Supernovae.
Research Axes
The Influence of the Host Dust
The objective of this package is to disentangle the intrinsic spectral variation of the SNeIa from the influence of the interstellar dust absorption in the host galaxy. What has been lacking so far to accomplish this task is an independent measurement of the host reddening at the SN location. This measurement is made possible for the first time thanks to the ongoing SNfactory-HST program.
Type Ia Supernovae Inhomogeneity
The objective of this package is to map the entire intrinsic variability of SNeIa by statistically comparing all spectrally different SN subgroups (3 to 4, e.g., Branch et al. 2009) into all possible astrophysical conditions (~6: dusty | young | metallic). Astrophysical biases in SN cosmology solely come from redshift evolution of the relative influence of each of these elements in the SN samples.
Accurate Cosmology using SNe Ia
The objective of this third package is to derive improved constraints on the Hubble Constant H0 and the dark energy equation of state parameter w, accounting for astrophysical dependencies of SNIa distance measurements. This package is based on knowledge acquired by the two former packages and combines public data with our samples.
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