The Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae: Are They Supersoft Sources?

Details The Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae: Are They Supersoft Sources? The Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae: Are They Supersoft Sources?

2009-12-04

arxiv.org/abs/0912.0757v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

submitted to ApJ 18 November 2009; 17 pages, 2 figures

Scientific paper

In a canonical model, the progenitors of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are accreting, nuclear-burning white dwarfs (NBWDs), which explode when the white dwarf reaches the Chandrasekhar mass, M_C. Such massive NBWDs are hot (kT ~100 eV), luminous (L ~ 10^{38} erg/s), and are potentially observable as luminous supersoft X-ray sources (SSSs). During the past several years, surveys for soft X-ray sources in external galaxies have been conducted. This paper shows that the results falsify the hypothesis that a large fraction of progenitors are NBWDs which are presently observable as SSSs. The data also place limits on sub-M_C models. While Type Ia supernova progenitors may pass through one or more phases of SSS activity, these phases are far shorter than the time needed to accrete most of the matter that brings them close to M_C.

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