Type Ia Supernovae (invited talk)

Abstract

The progenitor system and explosion mechanism of Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) is still uncertain, despite the large amount of observational data we have today. Given the importance of SNe Ia for different fields including nucleosynthesis, galactic chemical evolution and cosmology this is clearly unsatisfactory. Here we show results of consistent multidimensional modeling of three different explosion scenarios from the onset of the first thermonuclear flame to synthetic lightcurves and spectra. This way, we can predict the optical display of our models, compare it to observations and ideally identify the actual progenitor system and explosion mechanism. Contrary to previous results, we find that they all show good agreement with observations, so we cannot rule out any of these scenarios just yet, but they are possibly all realized in Nature. In this case, additional information like binary population synthesis will have to be taken into account to determine the dominant scenario among all SNe Ia.