Related papers: Further evidence for significant luminosity evolut…
The presence of an extended blue horizontal branch (HB) in a stellar population is known to affect the age inferred from spectral fitting to stellar population synthesis models. However, most population synthesis models still rely on…
The observation of SN 1997ff at redshift 1.7 has been claimed to refute alternative models such as grey dust or evolution for the faintness of distant supernovae, leaving only an accelerating Universe as a viable model. However, a very…
I discuss the use of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) for cosmological distance determinations. Low-redshift SNe Ia (z < 0.1) demonstrate that the Hubble expansion is linear with H_0 = 72 +/- 8 km/s/Mpc, and that the properties of dust in other…
It is well established that the Hubble residuals of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) show the luminosity step with respect to their host galaxy stellar masses. This `mass-step' is taken as an additional correction factor for the SN Ia luminosity…
The detailed nature of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) remains uncertain, and as survey statistics increase, the question of astrophysical systematic uncertainties arises, notably that of the evolution of SN Ia populations. We study the…
We used the GMBCG galaxy cluster catalogue and SDSS-II supernovae data with redshifts measured by the BOSS project to identify 48 SNe Ia residing in rich galaxy clusters and compare their properties with 1015 SNe Ia in the field. Their…
Type Ia Supernova(SN Ia) are a powerful, albeit not completely understood, tool for cosmology. Gaps in our understanding of their progenitors and detailed physics can lead to systematic errors in the cosmological distances they measure. We…
The use of Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) as cosmological tools has motivated significant effort to: understand what drives the intrinsic scatter of SN Ia distance modulus residuals after standardization, characterize the distribution of SN Ia…
A strictly linear evolution of the cosmological scale factor is surprisingly an excellent fit to a host of cosmological observations. Any model that can support such a coasting presents itself as a falsifiable model as far as classical…
We compute population synthesis models for the variation of H-alpha absorption indices (HaA and HaF), as a function of age and metallicity in old stellar systems. The models are based on the STELIB spectral library, and defined at…
(Abridged) Age derivation techniques for unresolved stellar populations at high redshifts are explored using the NUV spectrum of LBDS~53W091 and LBDS~53W069. The photometry and morphology of these galaxies suggest they are early-type…
Supernova rates are directly coupled to high mass stellar birth and evolution. As such, they are one of the few direct measures of the history of cosmic stellar evolution. In this paper we describe an probabilistic technique for identifying…
The locations of supernovae in the local stellar and gaseous environment in galaxies contain important clues to their progenitor stars. Access to this information, however, has been hampered by the limited resolution achieved by…
In relativistic inhomogeneous cosmology, structure formation couples to average cosmological expansion. A conservative approach to modelling this assumes an Einstein--de Sitter model (EdS) at early times and extrapolates this forward in…
The observed brightness of Type Ia supernovae is affected by gravitational lensing caused by the mass distribution along the line of sight, which introduces an additional dispersion into the Hubble diagram. We look for evidence of lensing…
Extinction due to intergalactic grey dust has been proposed as an alternative to accelerated expansion to account for the dimming of \s fluxes beyond $z \simeq 0.5$. The ``replenishing'' grey dust model, although fitting the observational…
Cosmic chronometers offer a model-independent way to trace the expansion history of the Universe via the dating of passively evolving objects. This enables testing the validity of cosmological models without concrete assumptions of their…
Gamma -ray bursts (GRBs) observed up to redshifts $z>9.4$ can be used as possible probes to test cosmological models. Here we show how changes of the slope of the {\it luminosity $L^*_X$ -break time $T^*_a$} correlation in GRB afterglows,…
We have obtained IFU spectra of 75 SN Ia host galaxies from the Foundation Supernova survey to search for correlations between the properties of individual galaxies and SN Hubble residuals. After standard corrections for light-curve width…
Type Ia supernovae provide direct evidence for an accelerating universe, and for the existence of "dark energy" driving this expansion. The Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) will deliver many hundreds of SNIa detections, and well-sampled…