Super Luminous Supernovae as standardizable candles and high redshift distance probes

Abstract

We investigate the use of type Ic Super Luminous Supernovae as standardizable candles and distance indicators. Their appeal as cosmological probes stems from their remarkable peak luminosities, hot blackbody temperatures and bright restframe ultraviolet emission. We present a sample of sixteen published SLSN, from redshifts 0.1 to 1.2 and calculate accurate K-corrections to determine uniform magnitudes in two synthetic rest-frame filters with central wavelengths at 400nm and 520nm. At 400nm, we find a low scatter in their uncorrected, raw mean magnitudes with M(400)=-21.70 for the full sample of sixteen objects. We investigate the correlation between their decline rates and peak magnitude and find that the brighter events appear to decline more slowly. We define a $\Delta M(30)$ decay relation. This correlates peak magnitude and decline over 30 days and can reduce the scatter to 0.25. We further show that M(400) appears to have a strong colour dependence. Using this colour rate decay relation, a low scatter of between 0.19 and 0.26 can be found depending on sample selection. However we caution that only eight to ten objects currently have enough data to test this colour rate decline relation. We conclude that SLSN Ic are promising distance indicators at high redshift in regimes beyond those possible with SNe Ia. Although the empirical relationships are encouraging, the unknown progenitor systems and how they may evolve with redshift are of some concern. The two major measurement uncertainties are the limited numbers of low redshift objects to test these relationships and internal dust extinction in the host galaxies.Comment: The authors regret that in the published version (2014, APJ, 796, 87) there were calculation errors in many of the values in Table 1 and in particular the important values for M(400) and the decline rates. The two main conclusions of the paper are unchanged, but the quantitative rms values are larger than previously reporte