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You can access the paper for free on arXiv: arXiv:2406.05050

The Dark Energy Survey is an international collaboration dedicated to observing huge patches of the night sky in an effort to understand how and why the Universe is expanding. We've known for a long while that the Universe is expanding, but we've recently found out that this expansion is accelerating. One interesting side effect of this expansion as predicted from our cosmological models is that time should run slower for 'clocks' at a cosmological distance. What clock can we observe several billion light years away? It'll have to be bright... It'll have to be consistent... Type Ia supernovae fit the bill!

Type Ia supernovae -- exploding white dwarf stars -- are essentially the same everywhere in the Universe and so they typically show the same characteristics. That is, they take the same amount of time to explode! We can see this in the 'light curves' of these events, or their brightness over time. What we see is that the light curves for distant supernovae take longer. In my first paper, we set out to infer this time dilation signature with the most supernovae at higher redshifts than ever before. Take a look at YouTube video below to see how we did it!

While I was writing this paper, I came across a wonderful 'accessible summary' of a paper by Claire Lamman, a graduate student at Harvard's CfA. Like Sydney Vach (another grad student at USQ), I've been inspired to make an 'accessible summary' of my own paper! Take a look at the below .pdf for a non-expert friendly version of my work with some extra pizzazz.