The discovery of high-redshift supernovae and their cosmological implications

In this thesis the author discusses the methodology for doing photometry: from procedure of extracting supernova counts from images that contain combined supernova plus galaxy flux, to standard star calibration, to additional instrumental corrections that arise due to the multiple telescopes used for observations. He discusses the different sources of photometric error and their correlations, and the construction of the covariance matrix for all the points in the light curve. He then describes the K corrections which account for the redshifting of spectra that are necessary to compare the photometry of the high-redshift data with those from nearby (z < 0.1) supernovae. Finally, he uses the first seven of the supernovae to test the hypothesis that they live in an under-dense bubble where the locally measured Hubble constant differs significantly from the true Hubble constant. He also uses the data to place limits on the value of the Hubble constant. Discussions of several other important aspects of the data analysis are or will be included in other papers. These topics include a description of how the covariance matrix is used to generate light-curve fits, a discussion of non-photometric systematic errors that also effect the measurements, and a discussion of the application of the supernovae to address other scientific/cosmological problems