Mario Livio
Publications

Supernovae and cosmology in the publication record

33 entries1980 – 2008 17 refereed

This is where the record turns outward. A Type Ia supernova is understood as a white dwarf pushed past the Chandrasekhar limit, the mass at which electron degeneracy pressure can no longer hold it up. Because that trigger mass is close to fixed, the explosions are close to uniform in brightness — which is what makes them usable as distance markers across billions of light years, and what turned a stellar-physics subject into a cosmological instrument.

The entries here approach it from the progenitor side, not the cosmology side, and that is the more interesting position. If the uniformity is what makes the measurement work, then anything that varies between progenitors is a systematic error in the distance ladder, and the question of which binaries produce Type Ia supernovae stops being a stellar detail.

What the papers address

The earliest entries are not about Type Ia at all. Three papers from 1980 deal with Rayleigh–Taylor instability in supernova explosions — whether convective overturn behind the shock is what allows a core-collapse explosion to succeed instead of stalling. One of them frames it as a possible solution to the supernova puzzle, which was the standing problem that simulations produced a shock and then watched it die.

From 1989 the subject shifts decisively. Two papers that year — on the coalescence of white dwarfs and Type I supernovae, and on merging white dwarfs, disk formation and Type I supernovae — put the double-degenerate channel on the table: not one white dwarf accreting from a normal companion, but two white dwarfs spiralling together until their combined mass exceeds the limit. The two channels predict different progenitor populations, different delay times after star formation, and potentially different brightnesses.

That is what makes the 2006 entry on the first Type Ia supernovae, subtitled as an empirical approach to taming evolutionary effects, a cosmology paper and not a stellar one. If the progenitor population at high redshift differs from the one nearby, the uniformity the method assumes fails across cosmic time, and the inferred expansion history moves with it.

How the group changes over time

The trajectory runs from mechanism to instrument to consequence. The 1980 papers ask how a supernova explodes at all. The 1989 papers ask which binaries make the useful kind. By the mid-2000s the papers are about what those explosions imply for the universe they sit in, and the final two entries in the whole index — on cosmology and life in 2005, and the interconnections between cosmology and life in 2008 — take the last step and ask what an expanding, accelerating universe means for the possibility of observers in it.

A 2006 entry on the final years of the Hubble Space Telescope, spanning planets to cosmology, sits alongside them and is the closest thing in the record to a statement of scope.

It is worth noticing what this group does not contain. There is very little here on gamma-ray bursts and nothing on neutrino detection, both of which were active supernova-adjacent subjects during the same years. The selection is consistent: the papers that appear are the ones where a white dwarf, a binary or an accretion process is doing the work, and a core-collapse event with no compact binary in it drops out. Read that way, the supernova papers are not a departure from the rest of the record but the point at which its central subject — matter accumulating on a degenerate star until something gives — reaches its largest consequence.

The 33 entries listed below are the subset of the 325-entry index that this site classifies under supernovae and cosmology, dated 1980 to 2008. This is the one facet where the classification cuts across two literatures — the explosion itself and the use of the explosion as a distance marker — and a title naming a Type Ia supernova is counted here whichever of the two it belongs to.

Five paper discs receding from large to small along a diagonal, each resting on a short bar that begins where the previous one ends

The 33 entries

  1. Livio, M., “The interconnections between cosmology and life,” in Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine-Tuning , eds. J. D. Barrow, S. C. Morris, S. J. Freeland, & C. L. Harper, Jr. (Cambridge: CUP), p. 114, (2008).
  2. Livio, M. & Casertano, S., Planets to Cosmology: Essential Science in the Final Years of the Hubble Space Telescope , Cambridge University Press (2006).
  3. Riess, A. G. & Livio, M., “The First Type Ia Supernovae: An Empirical Approach to Taming Evolutionary Effects in Dark Energy Surveys from SNe Ia at z > 2,” ApJ, 648, 884, (2006).
  4. Livio, M., “Cosmology and Life,” in Astrophysics of Life , eds. M. Livio, I. N. Reid, W. B. Sparks, ( Cambridge : CUP), p. 98, (2005).
  5. Strolger, L., Riess, A., Dahlen, T., Livio, M. et al., “The Hubble High z Supernova Search: Supernovae to z ~ 1.6 and Constraints on Type Ia Progenitor Models,” ApJ, 613, 200 (2004).
  6. Livio, M., “Type Ia Supernovae and Their Implications for Cosmology,” Rev. Mx. A. C., 20, 274 (2004).
  7. Livio, M., “Cosmology and Life,” in Measuring and Modeling the Universe, Carnegie Observatories Centennial Symposium, in press (2003).
  8. Livio, M. & Riess, A. G., “Have the Elusive Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae Been Discovered?” ApJ, 594, L93 (2003).
  9. Livio, M., Riess, A., & Sparks, W., “Will Jets Identify the Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae?” ApJ, 571, L99 (2002).
  10. Livio, M., Panagia, N., & Sahu, K., Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursts, Cambridge University Press (2001).
  11. Livio, M., “Type Ia Supernovae and Cosmology,” in The Greatest Explosions Since the Big Bang: Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursts, eds. M. Livio, N. Panagia & K. Sahu (Cambridge: CUP), 334 (2001).
  12. Livio, M., “Type Ia Supernovae and Their Implications for Cosmology,” in Cosmic Evolution, eds. E. Vangioni-Flam, R. Ferlet, & M. Lemoine (Singapore: World Scientific), 299 (2001).
  13. Garriga, J., Livio, M., & Vikenkin, A., “The Cosmological Constant and the Time of its Dominance,” Phys. Rev. D, 61, 023503 (2000).
  14. Livio, M., “The Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae,” in Type Ia Supernovae: Theory and Cosmology, eds. J. C. Niemeyer& J. W. Truran (Cambridge: CUP), 33 (2000).
  15. Yungelson, L. & Livio, M., “Type Ia Supernovae: A Cosmic History,” ApJ, 528, 108 (2000).
  16. Yungelson, L. & Livio, M., “Type Ia Supernovae: An Examination of Potential Progenitors and the Redshift Distribution,” ApJ, 497, 168 (1998).
  17. Livio, M., et al., “Accreting White Dwarfs and Type Ia Supernovae,” in Cataclysmic Variables and Related Objects, eds. A. Evans and J. H. Wood, (Dordrecht: Kluwer), p. 407 (1996).
  18. DellaValle, M. & Livio, M., “On the Frequency of Occurrence of Recurrent Novae and Their Role As Type Ia Supernova Progenitors,” ApJ, 473, 240 (1996).
  19. Livio, M., “Type Ia Supernovae and Supersoft X-Ray Sources,” in Supersoft X-Ray Sources, ed. J. Greiner (Berlin: Springer), p. 183 (1996).
  20. Branch, D., Livio, M.,Yungelson, L., Boffi, F.& Baron, E., “In Search of the Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae,” PASP, 107, 1019 (1995).
  21. DellaValle, M. & Livio, M., “On the Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae in Early-Type and Late-Type Galaxies,” ApJ, 423, L31 (1994).
  22. Kenyon, S. J., Livio, M., Mikolajewska, J., & Tout, C. A., “On Symbiotic Stars and Type Ia Supernovae,” ApJ, 407, L81 (1993).
  23. Livio, M., “On the Possibility of Obtaining Type Ia Supernovae and Accretion Induced Collapses from Cataclysmic Variables and Related Objects,” in Cataclysmic Variables and Related Physics, eds. O. Regev and G. Shaviv, Ann. Isr. Acad. Sci., p. 57 (1993).
  24. Livio, M. & Truran, J. W., “Type I Supernovae and Accretion Induced Collapses from Cataclysmic Variables,” ApJ, 389, 695 (1992).
  25. Livio, M., “Common Envelope, Double White Dwarf Systems and Type I Supernovae,” in Frontier Objects in Astrophysics and Particle Physics, Vulcano Workshop 1990, ed. F. Giovannelli, p. 139 (1991).
  26. Dgani, R. & Livio, M., “Local Detonations with Application to Type I Supernovae,” ApJ, 361, 540 (1990).
  27. Mochkovitch, R. & Livio, M., “The Coalescence of White Dwarfs and Type I Supernovae: The Merged Configuration,” A&A, 236, 378 (1990).
  28. Livio, M., “Merging White Dwarfs, Disk Formation and Type I Supernovae,” in NATO Advance Research Workshop on Theory of Accretion Disks, eds. F. Meyer, et al., p. 135 (1989).
  29. Mochkovitch, R. & Livio, M., “The Coalescence of White Dwarfs and Type I Supernovae,” A&A, 209, 111 (1989).
  30. Mochkovitch, R. & Livio, M., “The Coalescence of White Dwarfs and Type I Supernovae,” in White Dwarfs, ed. G. Wegner, pp. 515–518 (1989).
  31. Livio, M. & Buchler, J. R., “Rayleigh Taylor Convective Overturn as a Possible Solution to the Supernova Puzzle,” J. de Physique, Colloque C2, Supplement av. no. 3, Tome 41 (1980).
  32. Buchler, J. R., Livio, M., & Colgate, S. A., “Supernova Explosions—The Role of a Rayleigh Taylor Instability,” Space and Science Reviews, 27, 571 (1980).
  33. Livio, M., Buchler, J. R., & Colgate, S. A., “Taylor Instability and Supernova Explosions: A Two Dimensional Numerical Study,” ApJ, 238, L139 (1980).

Questions

Why are Type Ia supernovae useful for measuring distance?

Because the trigger is a mass threshold and not a variable quantity, the explosions are nearly uniform in intrinsic brightness. Comparing that known brightness with the observed brightness gives a distance, and the method reaches far enough to constrain how the expansion of the universe has changed over time.

What is the double-degenerate channel?

The proposal that a Type Ia supernova comes from two white dwarfs merging, not from one accreting mass from a normal star. Several entries here from 1989 onward develop that possibility, which matters because the two channels imply different progenitor populations and therefore different systematic errors in the distance measurements built on them.

Why does the progenitor question affect cosmology?

Because the distance measurement assumes uniformity. If the mix of progenitor types differs between the nearby universe and the distant one, the standard candle drifts with redshift, and the inferred expansion history drifts with it. That is the concern the 2006 empirical-approach paper is addressing.

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