arXiv, 2022
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2208.01357
Oxford University Press, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2(519), p. 3046-3063, 2022
Recent analyses have found intriguing correlations between the colour ($c$) of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) and the size of their 'mass-step', the relationship between SN Ia host galaxy stellar mass ($M_\mathrm{stellar}$) and SN Ia Hubble residual, and suggest that the cause of this relationship is dust. Using 675 photometrically-classified SNe Ia from the Dark Energy Survey 5-year sample, we study the differences in Hubble residual for a variety of global host galaxy and local environmental properties for SN Ia subsamples split by their colour. We find a $3σ$ difference in the mass-step when comparing blue ($c<0$) and red ($c>0$) SNe. We observe the lowest r.m.s. scatter ($∼0.14$ mag) in the Hubble residual for blue SNe in low mass/blue environments, suggesting that this is the most homogeneous sample for cosmological analyses. By fitting for $c$-dependent relationships between Hubble residuals and $M_\mathrm{stellar}$, approximating existing dust models, we remove the mass-step from the data and find tentative $∼ 2σ$ residual steps in rest-frame galaxy $U-R$ colour. This indicates that dust modelling based on $M_\mathrm{stellar}$ may not fully explain the remaining dispersion in SN Ia luminosity. Instead, accounting for a $c$-dependent relationship between Hubble residuals and global $U-R$, results in $≤1σ$ residual steps in $M_\mathrm{stellar}$ and local $U-R$, suggesting that $U-R$ provides different information about the environment of SNe Ia compared to $M_\mathrm{stellar}$, and motivating the inclusion of galaxy $U-R$ colour in SN Ia distance bias correction.