On the basis of the current observational evidence, we put forward the case that the merger of two CO white dwarfs produces both a Type Ia supernova explosion and a stellar remnant, the latter in the form of a magnetar. The estimated occurrence rates raise the possibility that many, if not most, SNe Ia might result from white dwarf mergers.
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0011150,
title = {Type Ia Supernovae and Remnant Neutron Stars},
author = {A. R. King and J. E. Pringle and D. T. Wickramasinghe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0011150},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, no figures; accepted for MNRAS; typo corrected