Text

theses

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) and gravitational lensing are important cosmological probes, but both are limited by theoretical, systematic uncertainties. One key uncertainty in distances derived using SNe Ia is our lack of understanding of the explosion mechanism for normal SNe Ia. We have studied peculiar type Iax supernovae that appear to be related to normal SNe Ia with the goal of understanding white dwarf explosions as a whole. In Chapter 2, using late-time Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of SN 2008A and SN 2005hk, both prototypical SNe Iax, we argue that these objects are pure deflagration explosions that do not unbind the white dwarf. In Chapter 3, we present observations of the type Iax SN 2012Z, one of the nearest ever discovered. Fortunately for us, its host galaxy, NGC 1309, was observed extensively with HST/ACS (to measure a Cepheid distance), giving us incredibly deep pre-explosion images of the site of SN 2012Z. We find that there is a source coincident with the position of the SN. We argue that the source is likely a helium star companion to the white dwarf that exploded. In galaxy-scale gravitational lenses, one of the largest systematic uncertainties arises due to other mass in the environment of the lens or along the line of sight (LOS). In Chapter 4, we develop an analytic framework to account for LOS effects. Our framework employs a hybrid approach treating a few perturbing galaxies as strong lenses, making it accurate, while treating the rest in the weak lensing approximation, making it also computationally efficient. In Chapter 5, we test our framework using simulations of realistic mass models. We suggest a method to characterize the strength of the LOS effects allowing us to systematically test when the weak lensing approximation is valid. We show that LOS effects are not equivalent to a single shear, but these non-linear effects are correctly captured by our framework. Our new methodology can be used to constrain cosmological parameters, like the Hubble Constant, in the era of precision gravitational lensing measurements.

ETD_5413

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Curtis McCully

doi:10.7282/T3QJ7FM7

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.