The Fate of Exploding Carbon-Oxygen Chandrasekhar-Mass White Dwarfs: The Production of Stable Iron-Peak Elements in the Type Ia Supernova Remnant 3C 397

Type Ia supernovae are important across many astrophysical domains, serving as standardizable candles for cosmology, sources of cosmic rays, turbulence, and enriched isotopes for the interstellar medium, and endpoints of binary evolution. Yet, the nature of their stellar progenitors remains elusive. For decades, the leading model to explain the relative uniformity of Type Ia supernovae properties consisted of carbon-oxygen white dwarfs accreting material to near-Chandrasekhar mass from a stellar companion, in the single-degenerate channel. It has slowly become apparent that there are likely several diverse ways in which carbon-oxygen white dwarfs may explode and produce a range of outcomes, including both normal and peculiar Type Ia supernovae. Indeed, it is only very recently that strong observational evidence supporting the single-degenerate channel has emerged, and that numerous questions surrounding it have begun to be unraveled.In this talk, I will focus upon the use of multidimensional numerical simulations in modeling the stable iron-group elemental abundances inferred from the hard X-ray spectrum of the galactic supernova remnant 3C 397. Because the electron capture rates involved in the production of these stable iron-group abundances are very sensitive functions of density, we now have an exquisite probe into the internal structure and composition of the progenitor near-Chandrasekhar mass white dwarf, as well as of the physics of the ignition and detonation, which gave rise to the observed remnant. I will conclude with an outlook on some of the many exciting prospects for future observational and theoretical investigation, which will have the potential of helping crack the mystery of the Type Ia supernovae progenitors.