Title: What's Next for Cosmology with Type Ia Supernovae

 

Abstract:

We are currently in the midst of a huge explosion in the number of Type Ia Supernovae we've found to better determine cosmological parameters. With the release of Pan-STARRs data, the start of the Dark Energy Survey, and multiple surveys at both low and high-redshift (like LSST), our statistics will soon improve by an order of magnitude. At the same time, analysis of the systematic uncertainties of these large samples has never been more difficult - there are still questions of how to understand the relationship between supernovae and their host galaxies, and how well we can calibrate all the various samples we wish to join. During this talk, I will give a tour of the current state of cosmology with Type Ia Supernovae and how things will look different within this next year and next few years. I will show initial results from the new Pan-STARRs cosmology analysis. I will give an update on the current status of the supernova analysis with the Dark Energy Survey. I will also discuss a new low-z survey called the Foundation survey and discuss how recent findings may affect the local H_0 measurements. I will discuss results from measurements of high-z SNe with the Hubble Space Telescope, and explain how the significance of these measurements depends on the parameterization of the equation-of-state w(z). This understanding is crucial for planning of the WFIRST mission in the next ten years, and I will present first simulations for this survey and how we can assess various strategies. There is an incredible amount of supernova data on its way, and I hope to give a sense of what to expect.