The merger of two carbon-oxygen white dwarfs has long been theorized to lead to a massive carbon-oxygen or oxygen-neon white dwarf, accretion-induced collapse to a neutron star, or a type Ia supernova. Determining which mergers lead to a particular outcome requires hydrodynamic simulations of the merging process. I give a brief overview of the current understanding of mergers and their end-products derived from simulations, and show how temperature, rather than density or mass, most strongly determines a merging binary's subsequent evolution. I then describe recent simulations that show mergers generate strong magnetic fields that could help drive a merger remnant to ignition.
@article{arxiv.1410.4580,
title = {The Physics and End-Products of Merging CO WD Binaries},
author = {Chenchong Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.4580},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
5 pages, 1 figure, to appear in ASP Conference Series "19th European White Dwarf Workshop (EUROWD14)"