Talk detail

Participant	Kirshner, Robert
Institution	Harvard University - 60 Garden Street - Cambridge - Massachusetts - USA

Session	OC1	Accepted		Order	Time
Talk	Oral abstract	Title	Better Distances from Infrared Observations of SN Ia
Co-authors
Abstract	Thermonuclear supernovae have demonstrated their utility for measuring cosmic distances and revealing the presence of cosmic acceleration. How can we do this better to measure the Hubble constant to 1%, trace local cosmic flows, and determine the nature of the dark energy? I will describe our efforts to use the large Center for Astrophysics collection of supernova spectra and ubvri JHK light curves to develop new methods for determining supernova luminosities and distances. These results have been published in recent papers led by Blondin, by Hicken, by Mandel, and by Friedman. The near infrared is the sweet spot-- in the infrared the supernovae are more nearly standard candles and extinction, which seems to be the most troublesome systematic effect, is less important. Fully exploiting the near-IR for cosmology requires careful K-corrections, for which Marion has been gathering spectra, a distant search, for which PanSTARRS is excellent, and high-precision IR photometry, for which HST seems the only path forward.