Carnegie Supernova Project: Classification of Type Ia Supernovae

Abstract

We use the spectroscopy and homogeneous photometry of 97 Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) obtained by the Carnegie Supernova Project as well as a subset of 36 SNe Ia presented by Zheng et al. to examine maximum-light correlations in a four-dimensional (4D) parameter space: B -band absolute magnitude, M B , Si ii λ 6355 velocity, , and Si ii pseudo-equivalent widths pEW(Si ii λ 6355) and pEW(Si ii λ 5972). It is shown using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) that the original four groups in the Branch diagram are well-defined and robust in this parameterization. We find three continuous groups that describe the behavior of our sample in [ M B , ] space. Extending the GMM into the full 4D space yields a grouping system that only slightly alters group definitions in the [ M B , ] projection, showing that most of the clustering information in [ M B , ] is already contained in the 2D GMM groupings. However, the full 4D space does divide group membership for faster objects between core-normal and broad-line objects in the Branch diagram. A significant correlation between M B and pseudo-equivalent width (Si ii λ 5972) is found, which implies that Branch group membership can be well-constrained by spectroscopic quantities alone. In general, we find that higher-dimensional GMMs reduce the uncertainty of group membership for objects between the originally defined Branch groups. We also find that the broad-line Branch group becomes nearly distinct with the inclusion of , indicating that this subclass of SNe Ia may be somehow different from the other groups.