Abstract
Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are considered some of the brightest transients in the universe, making them a preferred choice to measure distances to galaxies, and serve as standardizable candles. Despite their prominence, the explosion mechanism and stars which give rise to SNe Ia remain a mystery. Recent research has focused on the role which thin surface layers of helium, accreted from a secondary white dwarf on to the surface of a primary white dwarf star, may cause first a surface helium detonation and then a core detonation, thereby giving rise to a Type Ia supernova event. This thesis focuses on the three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations of these helium-ignited binary white dwarf mergers. In my simulation I use a binary system of a 1.0 M⊙ and a 0.6 M⊙ carbon-oxygen white dwarf with 0.005 M⊙ and0.03 M⊙ helium shell on each white dwarf respectively. Using the dataset generated by our collaborators with the moving mesh code AREPO, we map the system into the adaptive mesh refinement code FLASH and evolve it further to explore the conditions under which surface helium detonation can initiate, propagate, and potentially trigger core detonations.