The Pantheon+ Analysis: Forward Modeling the Dust and Intrinsic Color Distributions of Type Ia Supernovae, and Quantifying Their Impact on Cosmological Inferences

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that the observed color distributions of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) can be well described by a combination of a dust distribution and an intrinsic color distribution. Using the Pantheon+ sample of 1701 SN Ia, we apply a new forward-modeling fitting method (Dust2Dust) to measure the parent dust and color distributions, including their dependence on host-galaxy mass. At each fit step, the SN Ia selection efficiency is determined from a large simulated sample that is reweighted to reflect the proposed distributions. We use five separate metrics to describe the goodness of fit: distribution of fitted light-curve color c, cosmological residual trends with c, cosmological residual scatter with c, fitted color–luminosity relationship β SALT2, and intrinsic scatter σ int. We present the results and the uncertainty in 12-dimensional space. Furthermore, we measure that the uncertainty on this modeling propagates to an upper threshold uncertainty in the equation of state of dark energy w of 0.014(1) for the Pantheon+ cosmology analysis and contributes negligible uncertainty to the Hubble constant H 0. The Dust2Dust code is made publicly available at https://github.com/djbrout/dustdriver.