Licentiate Thesis: Type Ia Supernovae with the (intermediate) Palomar Transient Factory

by Ms Seméli Papadogiannakis (Stockholm University, Oskar Klein Centre)

Tuesday 13 Dec 2016, 10:00 → 12:00 Europe/Stockholm

FB55

Using type Ia supernovae, the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating was made possible in the late 1990's. Since then the supernova cosmology community has, among other things, focused on lowering the sys- tematic error, currently dominating the error budget, in order to dierentiate between dierent theoretical models. One way to do this is to study large samples of supernovae in the nearby universe and investigate their observa- tional signatures. In this thesis we use data from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) and its successor the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) to study the photometric and spectroscopic properties of 245 type Ia supernovae. PTF and iPTF are surveying the northern sky looking for new supernovae from 2009-present. Using this dataset we attempt to answer if the supernovae properties, e.g. their intrinsic brightness, evolve in cosmic time. We also asses how we can use the results from this survey to improve the cosmological output of future surveys.