The bimodality of type Ia Supernovae
Abstract
We comment on the presence of a bimodality in the distribution of delay time between the formation of the progenitors and their explosion as type Ia SNe. Two "flavors" of such bimodality are present in the literature: a "weak" bimodality, in which type Ia SNe must explode from both young and old progenitors, and a "strong" bimodality, in which about half of the systems explode within 10^8 years from formation. The "weak" bimodality is observationally based on the dependence of the rates with the host galaxy SFR, while the "strong" one on the different rates in radio-loud and radio-quiet early-type galaxies. We review the evidence for these bimodalities. Finally, we estimate the fraction of SNe which are missed by optical and near-IR searches because of dust extinction in massive starbursts.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0704.0877,
title = {The bimodality of type Ia Supernovae},
author = {F. Mannucci and N. Panagia and M. Della Valle},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0704.0877},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
5 pages, to appear in the AIP conference proceedings of "Supernova 1987A: 20 Years after Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursters", Feb 19-23, 2007, Aspen, CO. Replaced figure 1