Spiral Disk Instability Can Drive Thermonuclear Explosions in Binary White Dwarf Mergers

Abstract

Thermonuclear, or Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), originate from the explosion of carbon--oxygen white dwarfs, and serve as standardizable cosmological candles. However, despite their importance, the nature of the progenitor systems that give rise to SNe Ia has not been hitherto elucidated. Observational evidence favors the double-degenerate channel in which merging white dwarf binaries lead to SNe Ia. Furthermore, significant discrepancies exist between observations and theory, and to date, there has been no self-consistent merger model that yields a SNe Ia. Here we show that a spiral mode instability in the accretion disk formed during a binary white dwarf merger leads to a detonation on a dynamical timescale. This mechanism sheds light on how white dwarf mergers may frequently yield SNe Ia.

Final version (as in ApJL) with minor edits

References in corpus (4)

• The Initial-Final Mass Relation: Direct Constraints at the Low Mass End
• A Direct Multigrid Poisson Solver for Oct-Tree Adaptive Meshes
• The ejected mass distribution of type Ia supernovae: A significant rate of non-Chandrasekhar-mass progenitors
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Cited by in corpus (5)

• A systematic study of carbon-oxygen white dwarf mergers: mass combinations for Type Ia supernovae
• Polarisation spectral synthesis for Type Ia supernova explosion models
• Magnetized Moving Mesh Merger of a Carbon-Oxygen White Dwarf Binary
• High-Energy Neutrino Emission from White Dwarf Mergers
• Light Curves and Spectra from a Unimodal Core-Collapse SuperNova