Host galaxy effects in the SUSY model for Supernovae Ia

Abstract

For more than 40 years virtually all work on the theory of type Ia Supernovae (SN Ia) has assumed that these explosions were due to the transfer of mass to a degenerate star from a partner in a binary system. In these binary models, when the mass of one partner closely approaches the Chandrasekhar maximum for a stable degenerate system, fusion can be initiated and the star explodes. However, a number of long-standing nagging problems and the inability of any specific binary model to fit any significant fraction of SN Ia events suggest that fusion could instead be triggered by a phase transition in a sub-Chandrasekhar white dwarf star. It is possible that remarkable host galaxy effects not considered in previous work on phase transition models could point to a specific source of the supernova trigger. Performing a least [Formula: see text] fit to the delay time distribution to fix parameters, we give predictions from the SUSY phase transition model for the host galaxy effects. In addition we discuss a SUSY insight into the Phillips relation which is basic to the cosmological importance of the type Ia supernovae.