The variation of the fine structure constant: testing the dipole model with thermonuclear supernovae

LUCILA KRAISELBURD; SUSANA J. LANDAU; CAROLINA NEGRELLI; ENRIQUE GARCÍA-BERRO

ASTROPHYSICS AND SPACE SCIENCE

SPRINGER

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2015 vol. 357 p. 4 - 11

0004-640X

The  large-number  hypothesis conjectures  that  fundamental   constants  may  vary.   Accordingly,  the  space-time  variation  of   fundamental constants  has been  an active  subject of  research for   decades.   Recently, using  data  obtained with  large telescopes  a   phenomenological model  in which  the fine structure  constant might   vary spatially has been proposed.  We test whether this hypothetical   spatial  variation  of $alpha$,  which  follows  a dipole  law,  is   compatible  with  the  data  of  distant  thermonuclear  supernovae.   Unlike previous works, in our  calculations we consider not only the   variation  of the  luminosity distance  when a  varying $alpha$  is   adopted, but  we also take  into account  the variation of  the peak   luminosity  of Type  Ia  supernovae resulting  from  a variation  of   $alpha$.  This  is done  using an empirical  relation for  the peak   bolometric  magnitude  of  thermonuclear supernovae  that  correctly   reproduces the  results of detailed numerical  simulations.  We find   that  there  is  no   significant  difference  between  the  several   phenomenological models studied here and  the standard one, in which   $alpha$ does not vary spatially.   We conclude that the present set   of  data of  Type  Ia  supernovae is  not  able  to distinguish  the   standard model  from the dipole models,  and thus cannot be  used to   discard nor to confirm the proposed spatial variation of $alpha$.