Spiral instability can drive thermonuclear explosions in binary white dwarf mergers

We thank James Guillochon, Lars Bildsten, Matthew Wise, and Gunnar Martin Lellep for useful discussions and Matthias Aegenheyster for his contributions to the FLASH analysis codes. E.G.B. acknowledges support from MCINN grant AYA2011–23102, and from the European Union FEDER fund. The software used in this work was in part developed by the DOE NNSA-ASC OASCR Flash Center at the University of Chicago. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1053575. Simulations at UMass Dartmouth were performed on a computer cluster supported by NSF grant CNS-0959382 and AFOSR DURIP grant FA9550-10-1-0354. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System and the yt astrophysics analysis software suite Turk et al. (2011). R.T.F. is grateful to have had the opportunity to complete this paper during a visit to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, which is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant No. NSF PHY11-25915.