Presentation 1 : Oral/Invited
Type Ia Supernova Explosion Models: Predictions versus observations
Wolfgang Hillebrandt
Because calibrated light curves of Type Ia supernovae
have become a major tool to determine the expansion rate of the
Universe and also its geometrical structure, considerable attention
has been given to models of these events over the past couple of years. There are good reasons to believe that perhaps most Type Ia supernovae are the explosions of white dwarfs that have approached the Chandrasekhar mass and are disrupted by thermonuclear fusion of carbon and oxygen. However, the mechanism whereby such accreting carbon-oxygen white dwarfs explode continues to be uncertain.
Recent progress in modeling Type Ia supernovae by means of 3-dimensional
hydrodynamic simulations as well as several of the still open questions are addressed in this talk. It will be shown that the new models have considerable predictive power which allow us to study observable properties such as lightcurves and spectra without adjustable non-physical parameters. Finally, first results obtained by the European Supernova Collaboration (ESC) for a sample of nearby SN Ia and their implications for constraining the models and systematic differences between them are also discussed.