Dominant Type Ia supernova explosion mechanism driving cosmic chemical enrichment

Determine which Type Ia supernova explosion mechanism—pure deflagration or delayed detonation—predominantly contributes to chemical enrichment by Type Ia supernovae in the universe, thereby establishing which model better represents the main enrichment channel used in nucleosynthetic yield comparisons for astrophysical environments.

Background

To interpret the measured elemental abundance pattern in the Circinus nucleus, the study models enrichment as a mixture of core-collapse supernovae and Type Ia supernovae using published nucleosynthesis yields. For SNe Ia, the analysis tests both pure-deflagration (Fink et al. 2014) and delayed-detonation (Seitenzahl et al. 2013) scenarios across different white dwarf core densities.

Although both scenarios can be tuned to reproduce aspects of the observed abundance ratios when combined with constraints on core-collapse progenitor masses, the authors emphasize that current data and broader studies (e.g., in galaxy clusters) do not uniquely identify which SN Ia explosion mechanism dominates cosmic chemical enrichment. Consequently, they treat the difference between the two SN Ia yield sets as a systematic uncertainty in their modeling.