Crosschecking cosmic distances from DESI BAO and DES SNe
Phys. Rev. D 113, 123534 – Published 17 June, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/ty2b-j64k
Abstract
We perform a consistency check of DESI DR2 BAO constraints () by reconstructing the same quantities from DES supernovae (SNe) in bins with the same effective redshift and a Planck prior. Through mock analysis we show that and can be locally reconstructed model agnostically from and extended models, but only if one employs frequentist methods; purely Bayesian reconstructions from Markov chain Monte Carlo exhibit bias. We find that the ratio of the three values at different are consistent with a horizontal, thus confirming that the distance duality relation holds up to calibration. However, the ratio shows a decreasing trend driven by the bin, the significance of which varies from with Bayesian methods down to with frequentist methods. We show that replacing DES with DES-Dovekie SNe reduces the significance to and in Bayesian and frequentist approaches, respectively. We conclude that distances reconstructed from SNe show good agreement with DESI baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) distances across the redshifts studied. We also note that reconstructed from SNe favors DESI BAO over transversal BAO against a backdrop of a disagreement.