Be It Unresolved: Measuring Time Delays from Lensed Supernovae

Abstract

Gravitationally lensed Type Ia supernovae may be the next frontier in cosmic probes, able to deliver independent constraints on dark energy, spatial curvature, and the Hubble constant. Measurements of time delays between the multiple images become more incisive due to the standardized candle nature of the source, monitoring for months rather than years, and partial immunity to microlensing. While currently extremely rare, hundreds of such systems should be detected by upcoming time domain surveys. Even more will have the images spatially unresolved, with the observed lightcurve a superposition of time delayed image fluxes. We investigate whether unresolved images can be recognized as lensed sources given only lightcurve information, and whether time delays can be extracted robustly. We develop a method that successfully identifies such systems, with a false positive rate of $\lesssim 5\%$, and measures the time delays with a completeness of $\gtrsim 93\%$ and with a bias of $\lesssim 0.5\%$ for $\Delta t_{\rm fit} \gtrsim 10$ days.