The dark energy survey: detection of weak lensing magnification of supernovae and constraints on dark matter haloes

The residuals of the distance moduli of Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) relative to a Hubble diagram fit contain information about the inhomogeneity of the universe, due to weak lensing magnification by foreground matter. By correlating the residuals of the Dark Energy Survey Year 5 SN Ia sample (DES-SN5YR) with extra-galactic foregrounds from the DES Y3 Gold catalog, we detect the presence of lensing at 6.0 σ significance. This is the first detection with a significance level above 5σ. Constraints on the effective mass-to-light ratios and radial profiles of dark-matter haloes surrounding individual galaxies are also obtained. We show that the scatter of SNe Ia around the Hubble diagram is reduced by modifying the standardisation of the distance moduli to include an easily calculable de-lensing (i.e., environmental) term. We use the de-lensed distance moduli to recompute cosmological parameters derived from SN Ia, finding in Flat wCDM a difference of Δ ΩM = +0.036 and Δ w = -0.056 compared to the unmodified distance moduli, a change of ~ 0.3σ. We argue that our modelling of SN Ia lensing will lower systematics on future surveys with higher statistical power. We use the observed dispersion of lensing in DES-SN5YR to constrain σ₈, but caution that the fit is sensitive to uncertainties at small scales. Nevertheless, our detection of SN Ia lensing opens a new pathway to study matter inhomogeneity that complements galaxy-galaxy lensing surveys and has unrelated systematics.