The Progenitor Systems of Thermonuclear Supernovae

Despite the importance of Type Ia supernovae for modern astrophysics, their detailed explosion mechanism is still not fully understood. In this article, we present recent findings from numerical models in the context of their observed diversity and we discuss how these models can help to shed light on the explosion mechanism and to identify their progenitor systems. It is shown that the models have considerable predictive power and they can aid the identification of sources of systematic errors when used as distance indicators for cosmology