Possible Contribution of Magnetized White Dwarf Binaries to Type Ia Supernova Populations

Abstract

The evolution of an accreting white dwarf (WD) with a strong magnetic field toward a Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) may differ from the classical single-degenerate (SD) channel. In this paper, we perform binary population synthesis simulations for the SD channel with a main-sequence (MS) companion, including the strongly magnetized WD accretion. Under a reasonable assumption that the fraction of such systems is ∼15%, the resulting delay-time distribution roughly follows the t −1 power-law distribution. Within the (WD/MS) SD channel, the contribution from the highly magnetized WD is estimated to be comparable to that from the classical, non-magnetized WD channel. The contribution of the SD channel toward SNe Ia can be at least ∼30% among the whole SN Ia population. We suggest that the SNe Ia resulting from the highly magnetized WD systems would not share the observational properties expected for the classical SD channel; for every (potentially peculiar) SN observationally associated with the SD channel, we expect a comparable number of the “hidden” SD population to be in the normal class.