Abstract
Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) have proven their importance as cosmological standardizable candles, leading to the discovery of dark energy. These explosions are believed to be the result of a thermonuclear runaway in carbon-oxygen white dwarfs found in binary systems with a companion star. However, the true nature of their stellar progenitors still remains an active area of investigation. A crucial validation of the hydrodynamical models of these explosions is the comparison of their predicted nucleosynthetic yields and synthetic spectra and light curves against observations of optical SNe Ia transients as well as supernova remnants (SNRs). The hard X-ray spectra of SNR 3C 397 derived from the Suzaku and XMM-Newton satellites are distinguished by high abundances of iron group elements including Ni, Cr, and Mn, consequently making 3C 397 a strong candidate for a near-Chandrasekhar mass type Ia. A suite of hydrodynamical models is computed using the FLASH adaptive mesh refinement code. These models are run up to the homologous expansion and subsequently post -processed in the nuclear network code Torch, and the radiation transport code SuperNu to obtain their nucleosynthetic yields and synthetic spectra, respectively. Ultimately, the synthetic spectra are classified against observed events using the supernova identification code SNID. I conclude with a brief discussion of the relevance of the 3C 397 for the broader progenitor problem of SNe Ia.