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Supernovae

A smashing success

Nature volume 463, pages 35–36 (2010)Cite this article

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The progenitors of type Ia supernovae, the standard candles that lit the way to dark energy, have been elusive. A largely dismissed scenario has now produced one, but the results aren't what anyone expected.

Unfortunately, there are serious problems with both of these ideas. In the first, it seems difficult to drizzle on enough hydrogen at just the right rate to avoid causing a nova — a surface eruption that results in white dwarfs losing, rather than gaining, mass. And if there is so much hydrogen around, why is it never seen in the supernova4? The merger scenario circumvents these shortcomings, but has its own issues — simulations show that the smaller white dwarf is shredded into a disk that falls rapidly onto the survivor. This should cause carbon ignition near the surface, where densities are too low to trigger a supernova5 — a cosmic dud instead of celestial fireworks. However, on page 61 of this issue, Pakmor et al.6 demonstrate that the oft-maligned merger proposal is viable after all, at least under certain conditions.

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Figure 1: Merging white dwarfs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. D. Andrew Howell is at the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network and the Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93117, USA. ahowell@lcogt.net,

    D. Andrew Howell

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  1. D. Andrew Howell
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Howell, D. A smashing success. Nature 463, 35–36 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/463035a

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