A super-Eddington wind scenario for the progenitors of type Ia supernovae: binary population synthesis calculations

TL;DR

This study investigates the super-Eddington wind scenario for type Ia supernova progenitors using binary population synthesis, finding it contributes a small fraction to observed supernova rates and highlighting the importance of accretion and ejection efficiencies.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic binary population synthesis analysis of the super-Eddington wind scenario for SN Ia progenitors, incorporating detailed mass-accumulation efficiencies.

Findings

Estimated SN Ia birthrates are 0.009-0.315×10^{-3} yr^{-1}, much lower than observed.

Birthrates are sensitive to the critical mass-accretion rate and common-envelope ejection efficiency.

The WD+MS channel contributes only a small proportion to all SNe Ia.

Abstract

The super-Eddington wind scenario has been proposed as an alternative way for producing type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). The super-Eddington wind can naturally prevent the carbon--oxygen white dwarfs (CO WDs) with high mass-accretion rates from becoming red-giant-like stars. Furthermore, it works in low-metallicity environments, which may explain SNe Ia observed at high redshifts. In this article, we systematically investigated the most prominent single-degenerate WD+MS channel based on the super-Eddington wind scenario. We combined the Eggleton stellar evolution code with a rapid binary population synthesis (BPS) approach to predict SN Ia birthrates for the WD+MS channel by adopting the super-Eddington wind scenario and detailed mass-accumulation efficiencies of H-shell flashes on the WDs. Our BPS calculations found that the estimated SN Ia birthrates for the WD+MS channel are ~0.009-0.315*10^{-3}{yr}^{-1} if we adopt the Eddington accretion rate as the critical accretion rate, which are much lower than that of the observations (<10% of the observed SN Ia birthrates). This indicates that the WD+MS channel only contributes a small proportion of all SNe Ia. The birthrates in this simulation are lower than previous studies, the main reason of which is that new mass-accumulation efficiencies of H-shell flashes are adopted. We also found that the critical mass-accretion rate has a significant influence on the birthrates of SNe Ia. Meanwhile, the results of our BPS calculations are sensitive to the values of the common-envelope ejection efficiency.