Type Ia Supernovae and their Environment: Theory and Applications to SN 2014J

TL;DR

This paper develops semi-analytic models to understand the interaction of stellar winds with the interstellar medium, specifically applied to Type Ia supernovae like SN 2014J, revealing insights into their progenitor systems and observational signatures.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible modeling framework for stellar wind interactions, applied to Type Ia supernovae, to interpret observational data and infer progenitor system characteristics.

Findings

A low-density void caused by accretion disk winds explains late-time SN light curve behavior.

Narrow ISM lines with specific Doppler shifts indicate progenitor wind interactions.

A short delay between white dwarf formation and explosion is consistent with observations.

Abstract

We present theoretical semi-analytic models for the interaction of stellar winds with the interstellar medium (ISM) or prior mass loss implemented in our code SPICE (Supernovae Progenitor Interaction Calculator for parameterized Environments, available on request), assuming spherical symmetry and power-law ambient density profiles and using the Pi-theorem. This allows us to test a wide variety of configurations, their functional dependencies, and to find classes of solutions for given observations. Here, we study Type Ia (SN~Ia) surroundings of single and double degenerate systems, and their observational signatures. Winds may originate from the progenitor prior to the white dwarf (WD) stage, the WD, a donor star, or an accretion disk (AD). For M_Ch explosions,the AD wind dominates and produces a low-density void several light years across surrounded by a dense shell. The bubble explains the lack of observed interaction in late time SN light curves for, at least, several years. The shell produces narrow ISM lines Doppler shifted by 10-100 km/s, and equivalent widths of approximately 100 mA and 1 mA in case of ambient environments with constant density and produced by prior mass loss, respectively. For SN 2014J, both mergers and M_Ch mass explosions have been suggested based on radio and narrow lines. As a consistent and most likely solution, we find an AD wind running into an environment produced by the RG wind of the progenitor during the pre-WD stage, and a short delay, 0.013 to 1.4 Myr, between the WD formation and the explosion. Our framework may be applied more generally to stellar winds and star-formation feedback in large scale galactic evolution simulations.