|
30. SupernovaeObscuration by dust Recently, significant progress has been made by using Type Ia supernovae as ``standardizable candles. Supernovae are rare - perhaps a few per century in a Milky-Way-sized galaxy - but modern telescopes allow observers to probe very deeply into small regions of the sky, covering a very large number of galaxies in a single observing run. Supernovae are also bright, and Type Ias in particular all seem to be of nearly uniform intrinsic luminosity They can therefore be detected at high redshifts , allowing in principle a good handle on cosmological effects . Obscuration by dust is the leading concern about the reliability of the supernova results. Ordinary astrophysical dust does not obscure equally at all wavelengths, but scatters blue light preferentially, leading to the well-known phenomenon of ``reddening. Spectral measurements by the two supernova teams reveal a negligible amount of reddening, implying that any hypothetical dust must be a novel ``grey variety. This possibility has been investigated by a number of authors . These studies have found that even grey dust is highly constrained by observations: first, it is likely to be intergalactic rather than within galaxies, or it would lead to additional dispersion in the magnitudes of the supernovae; and second, intergalactic dust would absorb ultraviolet/optical radiation and re-emit it at far infrared wavelengths, leading to stringent constraints from observations of the cosmological far-infrared background. Thus, while the possibility of obscuration has not been entirely eliminated, it requires a novel kind of dust which is already highly constrained . | 
