A sample of dust attenuation laws for DES supernova host galaxies

Abstract

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are useful distance indicators in cosmology, provided their luminosity is standardized by applying empirical corrections based on light-curve properties. One factor behind these corrections is dust extinction, accounted for in the color-luminosity relation of the standardization. This relation is usually assumed to be universal, which could potentially introduce systematics into the standardization. The ``mass-step'' observed for SNe Ia Hubble residuals has been suggested as one such systematic. We seek to obtain a completer view of dust attenuation properties for a sample of 162 SN Ia host galaxies and to probe their link to the ``mass-step''. We infer attenuation laws towards hosts from both global and local (4 kpc) Dark Energy Survey photometry and Composite Stellar Population model fits. We recover a optical depth/attenuation slope relation, best explained by differing star/dust geometry for different galaxy orientations, which is significantly different from the optical depth/extinction slope relation observed directly for SNe. We obtain a large variation of attenuation slopes and confirm these change with host properties, like stellar mass and age, meaning a universal SN Ia correction should ideally not be assumed. Analyzing the cosmological standardization, we find evidence for a ``mass-step'' and a two dimensional ``dust-step'', both more pronounced for red SNe. Although comparable, the two steps are found no to be completely analogous. We conclude that host galaxy dust data cannot fully account for the ``mass-step'', using either an alternative SN standardization with extinction proxied by host attenuation or a ``dust-step'' approach.

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