Can Lambda be determined from nearby Type Ia Supernovae?

Abstract

Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) are the best standard candles known today. At high redshift ($z\sim1$) SNe Ia are used to determine the Cosmological Constant Lambda with great success. However the most serious concern is raised by thepossible luminosity evolution of the SNe Ia explosion itself, i.e., that their intrinsic luminosity might vary with the look-back time. It is unknown to which extent high-redshift SNe Ia can directly be compared to near SNe Ia in order to determine Lambda. A possibility to circumvent this problem is to restrict the analysis to nearby SNe Ia situated preferably in E/S0 galaxies. Since the signal will be much smaller, we have to consider an substantial sample. As there are not enough data yet available, we conducted our analysis based on 200 synthetic SNe Ia with a luminosity scatter $σ_{\mathrm{m}}=0.^{\mathrm{m}}12$ (derived from observations) assuming a homogeneous space distribution and a limiting distance of $z\leq0.16$. We show that this kind of data, which we expect from future observations, will allow us to distinguish between a matter dominated or Lambda-dominated ($Ω_{\mathrm{M}}=0.3$, $Ω_{\mathrmΛ}=0.7$) universe with a significance of up to 2-3 sigma.