On Type Ia supernovae from the collisions of two white dwarfs

Raskin, Cody; Timmes, F. X.; Scannapieco, Evan; Diehl, Steven; Fryer, Chris L.

doi:10.1111/j.1745-3933.2009.00743.x

Cited by 158 publications

(189 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…The degraded numerical resolution results in a 1 order of magnitude reduction of the released nuclear energy compared with our run D. The remaining differences between our test run and the results of Benz et al are mainly due to the different equations of state, but they may to some extent also reflect the differences in the networks and the advances in the SPH method. Our overall results are similar to those of Raskin et al (2009) which were submitted while our Letter was under review.…”

Section: Shock-triggered Thermonuclear Explosions From White Dwarf Imsupporting

confidence: 79%

COLLISIONS OF WHITE DWARFS AS A NEW PROGENITOR CHANNEL FOR TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE

Rosswog

Kasen

Guillochon

et al. 2009

ApJ

218

283

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We present the results of a systematic numerical study of an alternative progenitor scenario to produce Type Ia supernova explosions, which is not restricted to the ignition of a CO white dwarf (WD) near the Chandrasekhar mass. In this scenario, a shock-triggered thermonuclear explosion ensues from the collision of two WDs. Consistent modeling of the gas dynamics together with nuclear reactions using both a smoothed particle and a grid-based hydrodynamics code are performed to study the viability of this alternative progenitor channel. We find that shocktriggered ignition and the synthesis of Ni are in fact a natural outcome for moderately massive WD pairs colliding close to head-on. We use a multi-dimensional radiative transfer code to calculate the emergent broadband light curves and spectral time series of these events. The synthetic spectra and light curves compare well to those of normal Type Ia supernovae over a similar B-band decline rate and are broadly consistent with the Phillips relation, although a mild dependence on viewing angle is observed due to the asymmetry of the ejected debris. While event rates within galactic centers and globular clusters are found to be much too low to explain the bulk of the Type Ia supernovae population, they may be frequent enough to make as much as a one percent contribution to the overall rate. Although these rate estimates are still subject to substantial uncertainties, they do suggest that dense stellar systems should provide upcoming supernova surveys with hundreds of such collision-induced thermonuclear explosions per year.

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Section: Shock-triggered Thermonuclear Explosions From White Dwarf Imsupporting

confidence: 79%

COLLISIONS OF WHITE DWARFS AS A NEW PROGENITOR CHANNEL FOR TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE

Rosswog

Kasen

Guillochon

et al. 2009

ApJ

218

283

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The 847 keV emission also peaks at a later stage. Recently, several authors have explored the collision of two WDs in dense stellar systems as an alternate pathway to SN Ia within the family of DD scenarios (Rosswog et al 2009;Raskin et al 2009b). Shock-triggered thermonuclear explosions in such events are predicted to yield 56 Ni masses that are sufficient to power subluminous SNe Ia.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

REVEALING TYPE Ia SUPERNOVA PHYSICS WITH COSMIC RATES AND NUCLEAR GAMMA RAYS

Horiuchi¹,

Beacom²

2010

ApJ

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Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) remain mysterious despite their central importance in cosmology and their rapidly increasing discovery rate. The progenitors of SNe Ia can be probed by the delay time between progenitor birth and explosion as SNe Ia. The explosions and progenitors of SNe Ia can be probed by MeV nuclear gamma rays emitted in the decays of radioactive nickel and cobalt into iron. We compare the cosmic star formation and SN Ia rates, finding that their different redshift evolution requires a large fraction of SNe Ia to have large delay times. A delay-time distribution of the form t −α with α = 1.0 ± 0.3 provides a good fit, implying that 50% of SNe Ia explode more than ∼1 Gyr after progenitor birth. The extrapolation of the cosmic SN Ia rate to z = 0 agrees with the rate we deduce from catalogs of local SNe Ia. We investigate prospects for gamma-ray telescopes to exploit the facts that escaping gamma rays directly reveal the power source of SNe Ia and uniquely provide tomography of the expanding ejecta. We find large improvements relative to earlier studies by Gehrels et al. in 1987 andWoosley in 1997 due to larger and more certain SN Ia rates and advances in gamma-ray detectors. The proposed Advanced Compton Telescope, with a narrow-line sensitivity ∼60 times better than that of current satellites, would, on an annual basis, detect up to ∼100 SNe Ia (3σ ) and provide revolutionary model discrimination for SNe Ia within 20 Mpc, with gamma-ray light curves measured with ∼10σ significance daily for ∼100 days. Even more modest improvements in detector sensitivity would open a new and invaluable astronomy with frequent SN Ia gamma-ray detections.

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“…The diversity of SNe Ia may reflect the diversities of the explosion mechanisms (e.g., Jordan et al 2008;Kasen et al 2009;Bildsten et al 2007) and the progenitors. Some recent works for the latter differences include the companion's mass and metallicity in the single-degenerate scenario (e.g., Hachisu et al 2008) and the case of collision in the double-degenerate scenario (e.g., Rosswog et al 2009;Raskin et al 2009). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%