2013ApJ...778L..32M

The accretion of hydrogen-rich material on to carbon-oxygen white dwarfs (CO WDs) is crucial for understanding Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) from the single-degenerate model, but this process has not been well understood due to the numerical difficulties in treating H and He flashes during the accretion. For CO WD masses from 0.5 to 1.378 M_☉ and accretion rates in the range from 10^–8 to 10^–5 M_☉/yr, we simulated the accretion of solar-composition material on to CO WDs using the state-of-the-art stellar evolution code of MESA. For comparison with steady-state models, we first ignored the contribution from nuclear burning to the luminosity when determining the Eddington accretion rate, and found that the properties of H burning in our accreting CO WD models are similar to those from the steady-state models, except that the critical accretion rates at which the WDs turn into red giants or H-shell flashes occur on their surfaces are slightly higher than those from the steady-state models. However, the super-Eddington wind is triggered at much lower accretion rates than previously thought, when the contribution of nuclear burning to the total luminosity is included. This super-Eddington wind naturally prevents the CO WDs with high accretion rates from becoming red giants, thus presenting an alternative to the optically thick wind proposed by Hachisu et al. Furthermore, the super-Eddington wind works in low-metallicity environments, which may explain SNe Ia observed at high redshifts.