Re: possible mistake in P99 lightcurve fits

From: Saul Perlmutter (saul@lbl.gov)
Date: Thu Sep 16 2004 - 15:16:52 PDT

  • Next message: Alexander Conley: "Blindness for w"

    ...Greg will have to corroborate my memory on this, but I believe that
    we did know about this complication in doing the fitting correctly.
    This can be checked by looking at that tar'ed collection of fits for the
    P99 paper. --Saul

    Alexander Conley wrote:

    > I have now verified (using SN1998as) that snminuit behaves as I
    > have stated.
    >
    > For a B only fit to 98as, tbmax = -12.572 which corresponds to
    > the real date 50896.03. If I do a V band fit where tbmax is forced
    > to be -12.572, the date of B maximum comes out to be 50913.82.
    > Furthermore, a joint B and V fit with tbmax fixed is different that
    > either of the individual fits, with the date of B maximum 50912.65.
    >
    > This procedure furthermore introduces a bias between the low
    > and high redshift sample. With high quality data it is possible to
    > tell that the date of V maximum is 1-2 days later than the date of
    > B maximum, so the V fits will be systematically wrong by this
    > amount. At high redshift there are likely to not be observations that
    > can pick up on this difference, so the brightest B and V points will
    > probably be the same, and therefore most of the high redshift SNe
    > will not be affected by this problem.
    >
    > That is, I expect that the (B-V)max colors in P99 are systematically
    > offset between the low and high redshift sample.
    >
    > Alex
    >



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