Type Ia supernovas are astronomers’ best tools for measuring cosmic distances. In a first, researchers recreated one on a supercomputer to learn how they form.
? Efforts to understand both of these issues rely critically on distance measurements made using Type Ia supernovas.
Yet researchers don’t fully understand what triggers these strangely uniform explosions—an uncertainty that worries theorists. If there are multiple ways that they can happen, tiny inconsistencies in how they appear could be corrupting our cosmic measurements. Over the past decade, support has accrued for a particular story about what sets off Type Ia supernovas—a story that traces each explosion to a pair of dim stars called white dwarfs. Now, for the first time, researchers have successfully re-created a Type Ia explosion in computer simulations of the double white dwarf scenario, giving the theory a critical boost.
A hint comes from the unlikely element nickel. When a Type Ia supernova appears in the sky, astronomers detect radioactive nickel-56 flooding out. And they know that nickel-56 originates in white dwarfs—dim, fizzled-out stars that retain only a dense, Earth-size core of carbon and oxygen, enshrouded by a layer of helium. Yet these white dwarfs are inert; supernovas are anything but. The puzzle is how to get from one state to the other.
In computer simulations by Ruediger Pakmor’s team, the companion white dwarf sometimes explodes too. Researchers don’t know whether this happens in nature.Until around 10 years ago, the prevailing theory held that a white dwarf siphoned gas from a nearby star until the dwarf reached a critical mass. Its core would then become hot and dense enough to spark a runaway nuclear reaction and detonate into a supernova.
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