Metallicity as a source of dispersion in the SNIa bolometric light curve luminosity-width relationship

TL;DR

This paper investigates how progenitor metallicity influences the amount of nickel-56 produced in Type Ia supernovae, affecting their luminosity and potential use in cosmology, with implications for understanding explosion physics.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the metallicity dependence of nickel-56 synthesis and its impact on supernova luminosity, highlighting the role of incomplete silicon burning and transition density effects.

Findings

Nickel-56 production is significantly affected by incomplete silicon burning.

Metallicity influences the deflagration-to-detonation transition, affecting luminosity.

Progenitor metallicity alone cannot account for all observed supernova luminosity variations.

Abstract

The recognition that the metallicity of Type Ia supernova (SNIa) progenitors might bias their use for cosmological applications has led to an increasing interest in its role on the shaping of SNIa light curves. We explore the sensitivity of the synthesized mass of 56Ni, M(56Ni), to the progenitor metallicity starting from Pre-Main Sequence models with masses M0 = 2 - 7 M_sun and metallicities Z = 1e-5 - 0.10. The interplay between convective mixing and carbon burning during the simmering phase eventually rises the neutron excess and leads to a smaller 56Ni yield, but does not change substantially the dependence of M(56Ni) on Z. Uncertain attributes of the WD, like the central density, have a minor effect on M(56Ni). Our main results are: 1) a sizable amount of 56 Ni is synthesized during incomplete Si-burning, which leads to a stronger dependence of M(56Ni) on Z than obtained by assuming that 56Ni is produced in material that burns fully to nuclear statistical equilibrium; 2) in one-dimensional delayed detonation simulations a composition dependence of the deflagration-to-detonation transition density gives a non-linear relationship between M(56Ni) and Z, and predicts a luminosity larger than previously thought at low metallicities (however, the progenitor metallicity alone cannot explain the whole observational scatter of SNIa luminosities), and 3) an accurate measurement of the slope of the Hubble residuals vs metallicity for a large enough data set of SNIa might give clues to the physics of deflagration-to-detonation transition in thermonuclear explosions.