A comprehensive analysis of two recent collections of distant Type Ia supernovae is presented. The method used is both simple and rigorous. Correcting the absolute magnitudes for the measured decline rates yields in nearly all cases a dispersion consistent with measurement uncertainties, showing from these data that Type Ia supernovae are remarkably reliable standardized candles. With 26 supern...

As the shock and expanding shell of a supernova plow out through the circumstellar material at thousands of km s −1 , radio emission is generated. VLBI observations of this radio emission are presently the only means to directly image the expanding shell of any supernova much farther away than SN 1987A. The last decade has seen great progress in VLBI imaging of radio supernovae. In particular, ...

The study of the stars that explode as supernovae used to be a forensic study, working backwards from the remnants of the star. This changed in 1987 when the first progenitor star was identified in pre-explosion images. Currently, there are eight detected progenitors with another 21 non-detections, for which only a limit on the pre-explosion luminosity can be placed. This new avenue of supernov...

We examine the possibility that supernovae type Ia (SN Ia) are produced by white dwarfs accreting from Roche-lobe filling evolved companions, under the assumption that a strong optically thick stellar wind from accretor is able to stabilize the mass transfer. We show that if a mass transfer phase on a thermal timescale precedes a nuclear burning driven phase, then such systems (of which the sup...

Recent investigations on the delay time of type Ia supernovae have set useful constraints on the progenitors of type Ia supernovae. Here we have calculated the evolution of close binaries consisting of a white dwarf and a main-sequence or subgiant companion. We assume that, once Roche lobe overflow occurs a small fraction of the lost mass from the system forms a circumbinary disk, which extract...

Gammaand X-rays resulting from radioactive decays provide a potentially powerful tool to investigate the explosion physics of supernovae, since the distribution and the amount of radioactive isotopes are strongly dependent on properties of the explosion. In this paper, expected features of these high energy emissions are presented for bipolar jet-induced explosion models, which are recently fav...

The distant type Ia supernovae data compiled by Perlmutter et al. (1999) are used to analyze the Cardassian expansion scenario, which was recently proposed by Freese and Lewis (2002) as an alternative to a cosmological constant (or more generally a dark energy component) in explaining the currently accelerating universe. We show that the allowed intervals for n and zeq, the two parameters of th...

Recent use of Type Ia supernovae to measure acceleration of the universe has motivated questions regarding their optimal use to constrain cosmological parameters ΩM , ΩΛ and wQ. In this work we address the question: what is the optimal distribution of supernovae in redshift in order to best constrain the cosmological parameters? The solution to this problem is not only of theoretical interest, ...

Here we present some critical discussions about the systematic uncertainty by dust extinction in the recent cosmological results of high-redshift Type Ia supernovae. First we argue that the currently available data do not robustly exclude the cosmologically significant extinction either by the reddening check or the dispersion argument because of the observational uncertainties, even in the cas...

The weak gravitational lensing of high redshift type Ia supernovae has the potential of probing the structure of matter on galaxy halo scales. This is complementary to the weak lensing of galaxies which probes structure of larger scales. There are already several organized searches for these supernovae being carried out for the purposes of cosmological parameter estimation. A method is proposed...