Towards the Future of Supernova Cosmology

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Michelle Knights (University of Cape Town)
• Thursday 13 June 2013, 11:30-12:30
• Ryle Seminar Room, Cavendish Laboratory.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact David Titterington.

*** Note unusual time ***

Future surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will produce an unprecedented amount of photometric supernova data, not all of which can be followed up spectroscopically. Light curve fitting techniques can provide a probability that an object is a Type Ia supernova, but contamination from other types of supernovae can lead to biases to the estimation of cosmological parameters. BEAMS (Bayesian Estimation Applied to Multiple Species) is a fully Bayesian analysis technique designed to take contamination into account and produce unbiased estimates of the parameters. BEAMS is a general technique which should be applied in any situation where contamination from other types of objects is possible. In this colloquium, I will explain how BEAMS works and how it is applied to supernova cosmology. I will also discuss my current work on extending BEAMS to deal with correlated data and comparing BEAMS with an alternative Monte Carlo approach.

This talk is part of the Cavendish Astrophysics Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Cavendish Laboratory Seminars
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cavendish Astrophysics Seminars
• Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise
• Combined External Astrophysics Talks DAMTP
• Cosmology, Astrophysics and General Relativity
• Featured lists
• ME Seminar
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• Ryle Seminar Room, Cavendish Laboratory
• School of Physical Sciences
• Thin Film Magnetic Talks

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.