The Host Galaxies of High Velocity Type Ia Supernovae

Understand

In recent years, there has been ample evidence that Type Ia supernova (SNe Ia) with high Si 2 velocities near peak brightness are distinguished from SNe Ia of lower velocities and may indeed represent a separate progenitor system.

• These SNe Ia can contaminate the population of normal events used for cosmological analyses, creating unwanted biases in the final analyses.
• Given that many current and future surveys using SNe Ia as cosmological probes will not have the resources to take a spectrum of all the events, likely only getting host redshifts long after the SNe Ia have faded, we need to turn to methods that could separate these populations based purely on photometry or host properties.
• Here, we present a study of a sample of well observed, nearby SNe Ia and their hosts to determine if there are significant enough differences between these populations that can be discerned only from the stellar population properties of their hosts.