A new method for cosmological parameter estimation from Supernovae Type Ia data – Marisa March

Date: Tue. January 18th, 2011, 11:30 am-12:30 pm
Location: Rockefeller 221

We present a new methodology to extract constraints on cosmological parameters from SNIa data obtained with the SALT lightcurve fitter. The power of our Bayesian method lies in its full exploitation of relevant prior information, which is ignored by the usual chisquare approach. Using realistic simulated data sets we demonstrate that our method outperforms the usual chisquare approach 2/3 of the times. A further benefit of our methodology is its ability to produce a posterior probability distribution for the intrinsic dispersion of SNe. This feature can also be used to detect hidden systematics in the data.