Recent astrophysics observation reveals the existence of some superluminous type Ia supernovae. One natural explanation of such a peculiar phenomenon is to require the progenitor of such a supernova to be a highly super-Chandrasekhar mass white dwarf. Along this line, in this paper, we propose a possible mechanism to explain this phenomenon based on a charged white dwarf. In particular, by choosing suitable new variables and a representative charge distribution, an analytic solution is obtained. The stability issue is also discussed; remarkably, it turns out that the charged white dwarf configuration can be dynamically stable. In the end, we investigate the general relativistic effects and it is shown that the general relativistic effects can be negligible when the mass of the charged white dwarf is below about $3M_{\odot }$.

• Received 25 April 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.89.104043