Comments on: "Almost All Carbon/Oxygen White Dwarfs Can Support Double Detonations"

TL;DR

This paper critically reviews a claim that almost all carbon/oxygen white dwarfs support double detonations, arguing that the scenario is not the dominant explanation for normal Type Ia supernovae and highlighting inconsistencies with observed remnant morphologies.

Contribution

It provides a critical analysis challenging the universality of the double detonation scenario for Type Ia supernovae, emphasizing the diversity of proposed models and observational constraints.

Findings

Double detonation scenario is not the leading cause of normal SNe Ia.

Highly non-spherical explosions are inconsistent with observed SN Ia remnants.

Double detonation may explain some peculiar SNe Ia, but not the majority.

Abstract

I critically review some claims in the paper ``Almost All Carbon/Oxygen White Dwarfs Can Support Double Detonations'' (arXiv:2405.19417). The claim of that paper that the community converges on a leading scenario of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), the double detonation scenario, is wrong, as hundreds of papers in recent years study five and more different SN Ia scenarios and their channels. Moreover, the finding by that paper that the double detonation scenario with the explosion of the secondary white dwarf (WD; the mass-donor WD) is common, i.e., the triple-detonation channel and the quadruple-detonation sub-channel, implies highly no-spherical explosions. The highly non-spherical explosions contradict the morphologies of many SN Ia remnants. I find that the results of that paper strengthen the claim that the double detonation scenario (with its channels) might account for a non-negligible fraction of peculiar SNe Ia but only for a very small fraction (or non at all) of normal SNe Ia.