Primordial Black Hole Triggered Type Ia Supernovae I: Impact on Explosion Dynamics and Light Curves

TL;DR

This paper investigates Type Ia supernovae triggered by primordial black holes (PBHs) inside carbon–oxygen white dwarfs, proposing a unifying mechanism that bridges Chandrasekhar-mass and sub-Chandrasekhar progenitors. Through 2D hydrodynamic simulations, PNED-like ignition geometries (bubble vs ring) and two regimes with/without Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities are explored, coupled to post-processing nucleosynthesis and radiative transfer to generate light curves. Key findings show that noKH models reproduce the Phillips relation, while KH models yield near-Chandrasekhar-like energetics with substantial $^{56}$Ni production, suggesting a single-parameter family can account for SN Ia diversity within PBH-triggered explosions. This PBH-triggered channel provides a potential link between dark-matter physics and SN Ia phenomenology, offering a reduced-dimensional explanation for the observed luminosity–decline relation and informing future observational and theoretical work on SN Ia populations and PBH abundance.

Abstract

Primordial black holes (PBHs) in the asteroid-mass window are compelling dark matter candidates, made plausible by the existence of black holes and by the variety of mechanisms of their production in the early universe. If a PBH falls into a white dwarf (WD), the strong tidal forces can generate enough heat to trigger a thermonuclear runaway explosion, depending on the WD mass and the PBH orbital parameters. In this work, we investigate the WD explosion triggered by the passage of PBH. We perform 2D simulations of the WD undergoing thermonuclear explosion in this scenario, with the predicted ignition site as the parameter assuming the deflagration-detonation transition model. We study the explosion dynamics and predict the associated light curves and nucleosynthesis. We find that the model sequence predicts the light curves which align with the Phillip's relation ($B_{\max}$ vs. $ΔM_{15}$). Our models hint at a unifying approach in triggering Type Ia supernovae without involving two distinctive evolutionary tracks.

Figures (19)

• Figure 1: The mass-radius of the WD models with each data point marked by an asterisk.
• Figure 2: The density colour plot for WD models of various masses. The expected final composition after self-heating nuclear reaction are indicated by the dominant elements: Si, Ni, and Fe.
• Figure 3: (top panel) Colour plot for the pressure jump after the nuclear burning taking place for 1 second. Region A, shows no nuclear runaway possible. Regions B (C) show the active regions for the cases where Kelvin-Helmholtz instability is insignificant (significant). Region D shows where carbon dissociation takes place due to extreme temperature. (bottom panel) Same as top panel but with nuclear burning being 0.1 second.
• Figure 4: The temperature colour-map of the Model 06R-noKH taken at 0.1 (top left), 0.3 (top right), 0.57 (bottom left), and 1.15 s (bottom right), measured from the onset of ignition. Notice the length scale in the bottom right plot is in units of $10^4$ km.
• Figure 5: The energy evolution of the characteristic model including the total energy (tot; blue solid line), kinetic energy (kin; orange dashed line), internal energy (int; green dotted line) and the potential energy (pot; red dotted line). (right panel) The total energy production rate (blue solid line), and its components including the C-deflagration (orange dashed line), the NSE (green dot-dashed line) and the C-detonation (red dotted line) of the characteristic model.