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Type Ia supernovae are not common; they are rare events, happening maybe once per 100 years in a galaxy. Nevertheless they have two properties that make them fantastically useful for distance measurement. They are "standard candles". The physics of the supernova detonation, thought to be when a white dwarf accretes matter and exceeds the Chandrasekhar ...

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The Chandrasekhar limit in general does not pertain to the mass of the star as a whole. It addresses the mass of the degenerate core. It's only in white dwarfs where the Chandrasekhar limit applies to the mass of white dwarf as a whole, but that's because white dwarfs are almost entirely degenerate matter. Consider a 1.6 solar mass that is not a member of a ...

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The Chandrasekhar limit applies only for white dwarfs. Stars on the main sequence (or even off the main sequence) can easily surpass it, but if a white dwarf's mass is greater than the Chandrasekhar limit ($1.39 M_{\odot}$), it will undergo some sort of collapse. First, though, in response to Or has it already undergone supernova explosion? White ...

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