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SALT3: An Improved Type Ia Supernova Model for Measuring Cosmic Distances

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  • W. D. Kenworthy
  • D. O. Jones
  • M. Dai
  • R. Kessler
  • D. Scolnic
  • D. Brout
  • M. R. Siebert
  • J. D. R. Pierel
  • K. G. Dettman
  • G. Dimitriadis
  • R. J. Foley
  • S. W. Jha
  • Y.-C. Pan
  • A. Riess
  • S. Rodney
  • C. Rojas-Bravo
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Article number265
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>20/12/2021
<mark>Journal</mark>The Astrophysical Journal
Issue number2
Volume923
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

A spectral-energy distribution (SED) model for Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) is a critical tool for measuring precise and accurate distances across a large redshift range and constraining cosmological parameters. We present an improved model framework, SALT3, which has several advantages over current models—including the leading SALT2 model (SALT2.4). While SALT3 has a similar philosophy, it differs from SALT2 by having improved estimation of uncertainties, better separation of color and light-curve stretch, and a publicly available training code. We present the application of our training method on a cross-calibrated compilation of 1083 SNe with 1207 spectra. Our compilation is 2.5× larger than the SALT2 training sample and has greatly reduced calibration uncertainties. The resulting trained SALT3.K21 model has an extended wavelength range 2000–11,000 Å (1800 Å redder) and reduced uncertainties compared to SALT2, enabling accurate use of low-z I and iz photometric bands. Including these previously discarded bands, SALT3.K21 reduces the Hubble scatter of the low-z Foundation and CfA3 samples by 15% and 10%, respectively. To check for potential systematic uncertainties, we compare distances of low (0.01 < z < 0.2) and high (0.4 < z < 0.6) redshift SNe in the training compilation, finding an insignificant 3 ± 14 mmag shift between SALT2.4 and SALT3.K21. While the SALT3.K21 model was trained on optical data, our method can be used to build a model for rest-frame NIR samples from the Roman Space Telescope. Our open-source training code, public training data, model, and documentation are available at https://saltshaker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, and the model is integrated into the sncosmo and SNANA software packages.