Type Ia supernovae are some of the most powerful tools for testing different theories of gravity. These supernovae are explosions of massive stars that all look remarkably similar. By measuring how bright a supernova is, we can figure out how far away it is. Type Ia supernovae were used to make the initial discovery of dark energy in 1998. We have since used supernovae to measure the properties of dark energy with better and better precision with the goal of determining what it really is. In our new work, we developed a technique that uses the spectra of Type Ia supernovae to improve how well we can measure the distances to them. Our new technique can measure these distances around twice as well as previous techniques, and our results will be very important for measurements of dark energy with upcoming surveys such as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the Rubin Observatory, or for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
Kyle Boone is a lead author on two papers published in The Astrophysical Journal that report these findings. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, his research focuses on developing novel statistical methods for astronomy and cosmology. He is particularly interested in using Type Ia supernovae to probe the accelerated expansion of the universe that we believe is due to some form of “dark energy”. Dr. Boone is a former graduate student of Nobel laureate Saul Perlmutter, the Berkeley Lab senior scientist and UC Berkeley professor who led one of the teams that originally discovered dark energy. Dr. Perlmutter was also a co-author on both studies.