Supernovae Unite: Host-Galaxy Mass Measurements of Type Ia Supernovae and Their Impact on Cosmology

Abstract: Current consensus suggests that Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) brightnesses post light-curve standardization correlate with their host-galaxy stellar masses, which must be accounted for to obtain accurate cosmological constraints. Vincenzi et al. (2025) showed that different host-galaxy stellar mass measurements for the same dataset can produce redshift-dependent differences of order $\sim 0.01$ mag. We present internally consistent host-galaxy stellar masses remeasured using aperture photometry and spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting for SN-Unite, which combines the Pantheon+ and the Dark Energy Survey five-year (DES-SN5YR) samples into the largest SN Ia cosmology sample to date, with 2884 likely SNe Ia. We quantify the impact of photometry and SED fitting choices on SN-Unite cosmological parameters in Flat$w$CDM and find shifts well below statistical uncertainties. Our stellar masses differ from the Pantheon+ data release partly due to a redshift-dependent internal inconsistency within Pantheon+, while remaining largely consistent with DES-SN5YR (DES-Dovekie). When the Pantheon+ subsample of SN-Unite is combined with Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) and Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) measurements, the significance for time-evolving dark energy increases from 2.6$σ$ to 3.4$σ$ based on the maximum \textit{a posteriori} when our newly derived host-galaxy stellar masses replace the Pantheon+ data-release host-galaxy stellar masses, while DES-Dovekie remains virtually unchanged, consistent with the findings of Hoyt et al. (2026). By remeasuring the host-galaxy stellar masses using a consistent framework throughout the whole sample, we improve the robustness of the SN-Unite cosmological constraints against systematic differences in host-galaxy stellar mass measurements.