The Quest for a Supernova Companion

摘要

In their seminal work on supernova explosions, Hoyle and Fowler described how a white dwarf, a common endpoint in the evolution, of low- and intermediate-mass stars, could become a powerful fusion bomb if its interior temperature rose to about 2 X 10~8 to 5 x 10~8 K. They anticipated that this type of explosion could well correspond to the class of objects identified by Minkowski (2), called supernovae of type I and much later renamed type la. These supernovae are characterized by their spectral signatures (3) and are the brightest observable stellar explosions. The supernova of the millennium, the Lupus supernova (also designated SN 1006 after the year of its appearance) was a supernova of this type. The supernova discovered by Tycho Brahe (4), SN1572, was also of this type. Both are the only unambiguous type la supernovae observed in our galaxy during the last thousand years. Although considerable progress in hydrodynamic calculations in the explanation of the observed spectra and light curves has been achieved, puzzles remain about the evolutionary path toward explosion.