2024/06/07 by R. M. T. White, White, R. M. T., T. M. Davis +137 · 1 voice · 1 citation
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paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2406.05050
We present a precise measurement of cosmological time dilation using the light curves of 1504 type Ia supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey spanning a redshift range 0.1\lesssim z\lesssim 1.2. We find that the width of supernova light curves is proportional to (1+z), as expected for time dilation due to the expansion of the Universe. Assuming type Ia supernovae light curves are emitted with a consistent duration Δt\rm em, and parameterising the observed duration as Δt\rm obs=Δt\rm em(1+z)b, we fit for the form of time dilation using two methods. Firstly, we find that a power of b ≈ 1 minimises the flux scatter in stacked subsamples of light curves across different redshifts. Secondly, we fit each target supernova to a stacked light curve (stacking all supernovae with observed bandpasses matching that of the target light curve) and find b=1.003±0.005 (stat) ± 0.010 (sys). Thanks to the large number of supernovae and large redshift-range of the sample, this analysis gives the most precise measurement of cosmological time dilation to date, ruling out any non-time-dilating cosmological models at very high significance.