Speaker: Chris D’Andrea
Location: Austin, Texas
A description of one of the chapters of my PhD work on the apparent correlation between Type Ia supernova Hubble residuals and the observable properties of the host galaxies of these objects. I describe the history of studies of environmental dependence in Type Ia supernovae, and the characteristics of the SDSS-II Supernova Survey, where the data from this talk comes from. Establishing the nature of such a correlation is of great importance for future supernova surveys in order to avoid obtaining biased measurements of Dark Energy.
This was a Dissertation Talk at the 219th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting, held January 9-12, 2012, in Austin, Texas.