Theoretical uncertainties of the Type Ia supernova rate

By J. Claeys, O. Pols, Robert G. Izzard, J. Vink, F. Verbunt. 2014

188 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is thought that Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are explosions of carbon-oxygen white dwarfs (CO WDs). Two main evolutionary channels are proposed for the WD to reach the critical density required for a thermonuclear explosion: the single degenerate (SD) scenario, in which a CO WD accretes from a non-degenerate companion, and the double degenerate (DD) scenario, in which two CO WDs merge. However, it remains difficult to reproduce the observed SN Ia rate with these two scenarios. With a binary population synthesis code we study the main evolutionary channels that lead to SNe Ia and we calculate the SN Ia rates and the associated delay-time distributions. We find that the DD channel is the dominant formation channel for the longest delay times. The SD channel with helium-rich donors is the dominant channel at the shortest delay times. Our standard model rate is a factor of five lower than the observed rate in galaxy clusters. We investigate the influence of ill-constrained aspects of single- and binary-star evolution and uncertain initial binary distributions on the rate of Type Ia SNe. These distributions, as well as uncertainties in both helium star evolution and common envelope evolution, have the greatest influence on our calculated rates. Inefficient common envelope evolution increases the relative number of SD explosions such that for αce = 0.2 they dominate the SN Ia rate. Our highest rate is a factor of three less than the galaxy-cluster SN Ia rate, but compatible with the rate determined in a field-galaxy dominated sample. If we assume unlimited accretion onto WDs, to maximize the number of SD explosions, our rate is compatible with the observed galaxy-cluster rate.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/60856fd3b5cad31dcc88713169138b13ad92a5de

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Citations in the corpus

The cosmic merger rate of neutron stars and black holes (2018, background): “In the current paper, λ is defined as in Claeys et al. (2014), to account for the contribution of recombinations, while α is a constant.”
Mind Your Ps and Qs: The Interrelation between Period (P) and Mass-ratio (Q) Distributions of Binary Stars (2016, unknown): “The predicted rates and properties of certain channels of binary evolution are highly dependent on the adopted MS binary statistics (Fryer et al. 1999; Kiel & Hurley 2006; Davis et al. 2010; Claeys et al. 2014).”
TYPE Ia SUPERNOVA RATE MEASUREMENTS TO REDSHIFT 2.5 FROM CANDELS: SEARCHING FOR PROMPT EXPLOSIONS IN THE EARLY UNIVERSE (2014, background): “…also finds that DD progenitors could contribute substantially to the population of SN Ia explosions younger than 500 Myr (Ruiter et al. 2009; Greggio 2010; Ruiter et al. 2013), although recent work by Claeys et al. (2014) suggests that the DD pathway does not dominate the DTD until t > 500 Myr.”
The progenitors of compact-object binaries: impact of metallicity, common envelope and natal kicks (2018, methodology): “To compute λ we used the prescriptions derived by Claeys et al. (2014) (see their Appendix A for more details) which are based on Dewi & Tauris (2000).”
Massive runaway and walkaway stars (2018, methodology): “In our fiducial simulation qcrit,A = 0.65 for a main sequence (MS) donor (de Mink et al. 2007), qcrit,B = 0.4 for a Hertzsprung gap donor (Hurley et al. 2002), and qcrit,RSG = 0.25 for core-helium burning and red supergiant donors (Claeys et al. 2014).”
Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “Stability thresholds can be formulated in terms of the mass ratio (Claeys et al., 2014) or the relative radial response of the star and its Roche lobe to mass transfer (Soberman et al., 1997; Ge et al., 2015).”
Merging black holes in young star clusters (2019, methodology): “In this work, we assume α = 3, while λ is derived by MOBSE as described in Claeys et al. (2014).”
Constraining Formation Models of Binary Black Holes with Gravitational-wave Observations (2017, methodology): “Furthermore, BSE now uses a radius-dependent ﬁtting formula for the common envelope binding energy parameter λ (Claeys et al. 2014).”
Progenitors of gravitational wave mergers: binary evolution with the stellar grid-based code ComBinE (2018, methodology): “Some other codes do use a variable stellar structure parameter, e.g. Dominik et al. (2012); Claeys et al. (2014); Vigna-Gómez et al. (2018).”
COSMIC Variance in Binary Population Synthesis (2019, methodology): “We have added new models that are consistent with binary c, following Claeys et al. (2014) where we have modified the critical mass ratios of MS/helium-MS stars and binaries with degenerate accretors based on de Mink et al. (2007).”
Dawes Review 6: The Impact of Companions on Stellar Evolution (2016, background): “An alternative is helium donors, which are likely significant (Claeys et al., 2014).”