The difficulty of finding double-degenerate progenitors of type Ia supernovae

The double-degenerate progenitors of type Ia supernovae (SNIa) are double white dwarf binaries with a total mass near the Chandrasekhar limit and with merger timescales smaller than the Hubble time. The fact that we have not yet observationally confirmed the existence of these objects arises the question of whether the double-degenerate channel is a viable path for producing SNIa. In this contribution we show that this lack of detections is due to observational effects and that the probability of finding double white dwarf SNIa progenitors in the Galaxy is (2.1 ± 1.0) × 10 −5.