Gravitational lensing of Type Ia supernovae

Recently, Holz and Wald [Phys. Rev. D 58 (1998) 063501] have presented a method for determining gravitational lensing effects in inhomogeneous universes. Their use of realistic galaxy models has been limited to the singular, truncated isothermal sphere with a fixed mass. In this paper, their method is generalized to allow for matter distributions more accurately describing the actual properties of galaxies, as derived from observations and N-body simulations. This includes the density profile proposed by Navarro, Frenk and White, as well as a distribution of galaxy masses. As an example of the possible applications of the method, we consider lensing effects on supernova luminosity distributions.