HEAD-ON COLLISIONS OF WHITE DWARFS IN TRIPLE SYSTEMS COULD EXPLAIN TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE

By D. Kushnir, B. Katz, S. Dong, E. Livne, R. Fern'andez. 2013

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), thermonuclear explosions of carbon–oxygen white dwarfs (CO-WDs), are currently the best cosmological “standard candles,” but the triggering mechanism of the explosion is unknown. It was recently shown that the rate of head-on collisions of typical field CO-WDs in triple systems may be comparable to the SNe Ia rate. Here we provide evidence supporting a scenario in which the majority of SNe Ia are the result of such head-on collisions of CO-WDs. In this case, the nuclear detonation is due to a well understood shock ignition, devoid of commonly introduced free parameters such as the deflagration velocity or transition to detonation criteria. By using two-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations with a fully resolved ignition process, we show that zero-impact-parameter collisions of typical CO-WDs with masses 0.5–1 M☉ result in explosions that synthesize 56Ni masses in the range of ∼0.1–1 M☉, spanning the wide distribution of yields observed for the majority of SNe Ia. All collision models yield the same late-time (≳ 60 days since explosion) bolometric light curve when normalized by 56Ni masses (to better than 30%), in agreement with observations. The calculated widths of the 56Ni-mass-weighted line-of-sight velocity distributions are correlated with the calculated 56Ni yield, agreeing with the observed correlation. The strong correlation, shown here for the first time, between 56Ni yield and total mass of the colliding CO-WDs (insensitive to their mass ratio), is suggestive as the source for the continuous distribution of observed SN Ia features, possibly including the Philips relation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3ad061e44a1a1b9edf6b5468dc337b879f6517ba

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Filippenko
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Citations in the corpus

• The Carnegie Supernova Project. I. Third Photometry Data Release of Low-redshift Type Ia Supernovae and Other White Dwarf Explosions (2017, background): “O white dwarfs in a triple-star system (Kushnir et al. 2013).”
• Suppression of extreme orbital evolution in triple systems with short-range forces (2014, background): “…Ia supernovae from white-dwarf binary mergers (e.g., Thompson 2011; Prodan, Murray, & Thompson 2013) or direct collisions (e.g., Katz & Dong 2012; Kushnir et al. 2013); (iv) The properties of irregular satellites (particularly their inclination distribution relative to the ecliptic) of giant…”
• Sub-Chandrasekhar-mass White Dwarf Detonations Revisited (2017, methodology): “We broaden the detonation by introducing a limit to the relative amount the temperature can change within each cell in one timestep due to nuclear burning, |∆ lnT |max, similar to the method employed by Kushnir et al. (2013).”
• The Eccentric Kozai-Lidov Effect and Its Applications (2016, background): “…angular momentum is likely to reach almost zero (i.e., an almost radial motion) on timescales at the order of the inner orbit period (see Section 3) causing the collision of two white dwarfs and resulting in type Ia supernova (e.g., Katz and Dong 2012; Kushnir et al. 2013; Dong et al. 2014).”
• Eccentric Black Hole Gravitational-wave Capture Sources in Galactic Nuclei: Distribution of Binary Parameters (2017, background): “…4 http://www.ego-gw.it/ 5 http://gwcenter.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ 6 http://www.gw-indigo.org/ stellar systems, which can drive the low-eccentricity inner binary to high eccentricity (Gültekin et al. 2006; O’Leary et al. 2006; Kushnir et al. 2013; Antonini & Rasio 2016; Rodriguez et al. 2017).”