On June 25 we hosted a special session “Hunting down the elusive progenitors and explosion mechanisms of Type Ia supernovae” as part of the annual European Week of Astronomy and Space Science which took place on Tenerife (Spain) from June 22-26 .

Our special session aimed at bringing together theorists and observers to give an overview about the current observational state of the art, present recent theoretical progress and discuss the open problems in SNe Ia. The programme consisted of a total of 3 invited talks, 15 contributed talks and 9 posters with participants coming from Australia, Chile, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United Kingdom. With about 50 scientists attending, the session was quite a success.

The programme was divided in three blocks covering multi-wavelength observations (invited speaker: Assaf Sternberg), binary population synthesis, rates and progenitor searches (invited speaker: Silvia Toonen), and theoretical explosion models and their comparison to observational data (invited speaker: Pablo Loren Aguilar). Highlights of the meeting were presentations on the first gamma-ray detection of a SN Ia, radio constraints on the progenitor of SN 2014J, the discovery of a potential SN Ia progenitor system in a planetary nebula and first synthetic spectropolarimetry for 3D merger models.