Sub-Chandrasekhar-mass White Dwarf Detonations Revisited

By K. Shen, D. Kasen, Broxton J. Miles, Dean M. Townsley. 2017

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The detonation of a sub-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarf (WD) has emerged as one of the most promising Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) progenitor scenarios. Recent studies have suggested that the rapid transfer of a very small amount of helium from one WD to another is sufficient to ignite a helium shell detonation that subsequently triggers a carbon core detonation, yielding a “dynamically driven double-degenerate double-detonation” SN Ia. Because the helium shell that surrounds the core explosion is so minimal, this scenario approaches the limiting case of a bare C/O WD detonation. Motivated by discrepancies in previous literature and by a recent need for detailed nucleosynthetic data, we revisit simulations of naked C/O WD detonations in this paper. We disagree to some extent with the nucleosynthetic results of previous work on sub-Chandrasekhar-mass bare C/O WD detonations; for example, we find that a median-brightness SN Ia is produced by the detonation of a 1.0 WD instead of a more massive and rarer 1.1 WD. The neutron-rich nucleosynthesis in our simulations agrees broadly with some observational constraints, although tensions remain with others. There are also discrepancies related to the velocities of the outer ejecta and light curve shapes, but overall our synthetic light curves and spectra are roughly consistent with observations. We are hopeful that future multidimensional simulations will resolve these issues and further bolster the dynamically driven double-degenerate double-detonation scenario’s potential to explain most SNe Ia.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa38bb8bade90e1b2100b4f644fc769cc3b273da

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Kasen
2. M. Kromer
3. K. Shen
4. Rüdiger Pakmor
5. S. Jha
6. Dean M. Townsley
7. Broxton J. Miles
8. R. Foley

In Instrumentation

1. S. Jha
2. D. Koester
3. C. Badenes
4. J. Schwab
5. R. Foley
6. B. Gänsicke
7. Morgan Fraser
8. S. Toonen

Citations in the corpus

• Observational Predictions for Sub-Chandrasekhar Mass Explosions: Further Evidence for Multiple Progenitor Systems for Type Ia Supernovae (2018, background): “This can be seen in Figure 9 and in Figure 15 of Shen et al. (2018a) where the Si II velocity is proportional to the mass of the WD.”
• Three Hypervelocity White Dwarfs in Gaia DR2: Evidence for Dynamically Driven Double-degenerate Double-detonation Type Ia Supernovae (2018, methodology): “We assume the mass of the exploding WD ranges from 0.85M (lower boundary of each region) to 1.1M (upper boundary), as motivated by WD detonation calculations (Sim et al. 2010; Blondin et al. 2017; Shen et al. 2018).”