The rates of Type Ia Supernovae. I. Analytical Formulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces analytical tools to model Type Ia Supernova rates based on star formation history, providing formulations for delay times and comparing progenitor models with observational data.

Contribution

It presents new analytical formulations for SNIa delay time distributions and assesses their implications for different progenitor scenarios.

Findings

The current SNIa rate suggests a realization probability of about 0.001.

Double Degenerate models are favored by recent galaxy observations.

Fe release timescales range between 0.3 and 3 Gyr.

Abstract

This paper provides a handy tool to compute the impact of Type Ia Supernova (SNIa) on the evolution of stellar systems. An effective formalism is presented to couple the SNIa rate to the star formation history, which rests upon the definition of two key properties of the progenitor's model: the realization probability of the SNIa event from a single stellar generation and the distribution function of the delay times. It is shown that the current SNIa rate in late type galaxies implies that the realization probability is on the order of 0.001. Analytical formulations for the distribution function of the delay times for Single (SD) and Double Degenerate (DD) progenitors are derived, based on stellar evolution arguments. These formulations, which agree well with the results of Monte Carlo simulations for the evolution of close binaries, have a built in parametrization of the key properties of the alternative candidates. The various models for the progenitors have different impact on the large scales. In particular, the paper examines the systematic trend of the SNIa rate per unit mass with the color of the parent galaxy, and shows that the recent observations favor the DD model. The SD scenario can reproduce the data only if the distribution of the primordial mass ratios is flat, and the accretion efficiency onto the WD is close to 100%. The timescale for the Fe release from SNIa to the interstellar medium ranges between 0.3 and 3 Gyr for a wide variety of hypothesis on the SNIa progenitors. (ABRIDGED)