Letting alpha vary (See HST paper site)

From: Robert A. Knop Jr. (robert.a.knop@vanderbilt.edu)
Date: Sun Mar 23 2003 - 14:45:01 PST

  • Next message: Greg Aldering: "Re: Fun with chisquares (more fits put on HST paper web page)"

    See:

       http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/~rknop/scp/hst/#screwingaround

    Based on a suggestion from and discussion with Greg, I tried doing the
    fit where instead of fixing alpha for purposes of error propogation, I
    propogated the stretch error into magnitude errors using the alpha
    currently being tested. This means bigger error bars at bigger values
    of alpha, which will tend to drive the fit to want bigger values of
    alpha since it gets lower chisquares due to the larger error bars.

    Line B-4 shows the results on the P99 data, using both the data dirctly
    from that gersontable and my refits/re-Kcorrections of it.

    Interestingly, with a fixed alpha for uncertainty purposes, my
    lightcurve parameters tended to return a higher best-fit alpha than did
    the P99 lightcurve parameters. We get the opposite result when the
    alpha used for error analysis is the same as the alpha being tested for
    each chisquare value. I don't really know what to make of that
    observation, though.

    There are all sorts of worries associated with systematic effects and so
    forth (specifically, you're more likely to find high-stretch supernovae
    in a little more host galaxy extinction, so if you aren't correcting for
    extinction you'd expect that to lower alpha... but it gets really scary
    when you think about comparing that systematic in the low and high
    redshift subsets).

    -Rob

    -- 
    --Prof. Robert Knop
      Department of Physics & Astronomy, Vanderbilt University
      robert.a.knop@vanderbilt.edu
    


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