Still non-accelerating: age-bias correction in supernova cosmology is robust to host-progenitor age mapping
astro-ph.CO, astro-ph.GA
Submitted: 2026-05-20
Updated: 2026-05-20
Comments: 5 pages, 2 figures, submitted to MNRAS
Journal ref: Mon Not R Astron Soc (2026)
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We re-examine the claim by Wiseman et al.
Terminology
Abstract
We re-examine the claim by Wiseman et al. (2026) that progenitor-age bias has a negligible impact on cosmological inferences from Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). We show that their inferred host-age-Hubble residual (HR) slope is severely underestimated because their combined SN Ia sample spans an unusually wide redshift range (0.04 < z < 0.42), over which the mean host age evolves by about,3 Gyr. As a result, SNe Ia spanning substantial host-age differences are effectively assigned similar HR values prior to regression, artificially flattening the inferred age-HR relation. In addition, their application of the Pantheon+ host-mass correction further suppresses the slope, but the underlying dust model is highly incompatible with the measured dust attenuation curves of galaxies. We also demonstrate that our age bias correction is robust to uncertainties in host-progenitor age mapping arising from different choices of the SN Ia delay-time distribution. The reduced progenitor-age evolution argued by Wiseman et al. (2026) must, by the same logic, be accompanied by a steeper inferred progenitor-age-HR slope. When these two effects are consistently combined in computing the redshift-dependent magnitude correction, the final correction, and hence the resulting cosmological impact, remain largely unchanged from Son et al. (2025).
Sources
- Old Universe, Young SNe Ia: A Statistical Analysis of Type Ia Supernova Progenitor Age from 6,983 TITAN Host Galaxies, and Implications for Cosmology
- Still Accelerating: Type Ia supernova cosmology is robust to host galaxy age evolution
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