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What killed the white dwarfs? (Aside from the giant explosion)

Merger or extra matter? Two papers come to opposite conclusions

For Ars Technica:

Type Ia supernovae are explosions that occur when white dwarfs strip matter off a companion star, exceed their maximum possible mass, and blow up.

No, wait: type Ia supernovae are the explosions caused when two white dwarfs collide.

While it’s reasonably certain that white dwarfs—the Earth-size remnant of stars similar to the Sun—are involved, the observational evidence for how these supernovae actually explode is messy. This week’s issue of Nature is a prime example: two back-to-back papers provide evidence for a white dwarf-companion star explosion and a two-white-dwarf collision scenario, respectively. Ultimately, these apparently contradictory results could mean there are two distinct types of white dwarf supernovae… or that we still don’t understand what’s going on.

The stakes are high. Unlike other supernovae, which involve the death of a star much more massive than the Sun, type Ia supernovae all explode in very similar ways. The pattern of light they emit during and after the explosion provides a reliable measurement of how far away they are. Since supernovae are bright enough to be visible from billions of light-years away, astronomers use them to measure the expansion and acceleration rate of the Universe, as recognized in the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. Because they are so important to cosmology, researchers want to understand what objects are involved in the explosion and exactly how they blow up. [Read the rest at Ars Technica…]