Towards a Cosmological Hubble Diagram for Type II-P Supernovae

We present the first high-redshift Hubble diagram for Type II-P supernovae (SNe II-P) based upon five events at redshift up to z~0.3. This diagram was constructed using photometry from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Supernova Legacy Survey and absorption line spectroscopy from the Keck observatory. The method used to measure distances to these supernovae is based on recent work by Hamuy & Pinto (2002) and exploits a correlation between the absolute brightness of SNe II-P and the expansion velocities derived from the minimum of the Fe II 516.9 nm P-Cygni feature observed during the plateau phases. We present three refinements to this method which significantly improve the practicality of measuring the distances of SNe II-P at cosmologically interesting redshifts. These are an extinction correction measurement based on the V-I colors at day 50, a cross-correlation measurement for the expansion velocity and the ability to extrapolate such velocities accurately over almost the entire plateau phase. We apply this revised method to our dataset of high-redshift SNe II-P and find that the resulting Hubble diagram has a scatter of only 0.26 magnitudes, thus demonstrating the feasibility of measuring the expansion history, with present facilities, using a method independent of that based upon supernovae of Type Ia.