On the formation history of Galactic double neutron stars

By A. Vigna-G'omez, Coenraad J. Neijssel, Simon Stevenson, Jim W. Barrett, Krzysztof Belczyński, S. Justham, Selma de Mink, Bernhard Müller, P. Podsiadlowski, M. Renzo and 2 more. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2018

201 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Double neutron stars (DNSs) have been observed as Galactic radio pulsars, and the recent discovery of gravitational waves from the DNS merger GW170817 adds to the known DNS population. We perform rapid population synthesis of massive binary stars and discuss model predictions, including DNS formation rates, mass distributions, and delay time distributions. We vary assumptions and parameters of physical processes such as mass transfer stability criteria, supernova natal kick distributions, remnant mass prescriptions, and common-envelope energetics.We compute the likelihood of observing the orbital period-eccentricity distribution of the Galactic DNS population under each of our population synthesis models, allowing us to quantitatively compare the models.We find that mass transfer from a stripped post-heliumburning secondary (case BB) on to a neutron star is most likely dynamically stable. We also find that a natal kick distribution composed of both low (Maxwellian σ = 30 km s-1) and high (σ = 265 km s-1) components is preferred over a single high-kick component. We conclude that the observed DNS mass distribution can place strong constraints on model assumptions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/15e8290597cb94386d1ee5b81996f69790766695

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Oceanography

Citations in the corpus

The origin of spin in binary black holes (2019, methodology): “We use the parametric binary population synthesis code COMPAS (e.g., Stevenson et al. 2017, 2019; Barrett et al. 2017, 2018; Vigna-Gómez et al. 2018; Neijssel et al. 2019) to evolve isolated stellar binaries until the formation of BH–He-star systems, namely the immediate progenitors of BBHs.”
Unveiling the gravitational universe at μ-Hz frequencies (2019, background): “Although only a handful of Galactic DNS can be detected at milli-Hz frequencies, several hundreds of thousands are expected to reside in the μ-Hz band [191, 272].”
Three-dimensional simulations of neutrino-driven core-collapse supernovae from low-mass single and binary star progenitors (2018, methodology): “If, as argued by Vigna-Gómez et al. (2018), the anisotropy parameter is more or less universal over a wide range of progenitor masses, one would expect the kick velocity to be strongly correlated with the explosion energy.”
Neutron Star Mergers Might Not Be the Only Source of r-process Elements in the Milky Way (2018, result): “These results are consistent with other population synthesis studies (Chruslinska et al. 2018; Kruckow et al. 2018; Vigna-Gómez et al. 2018; Giacobbo & Mapelli 2018).”
The effect of the metallicity-specific star formation history on double compact object mergers (2019, methodology): “The effect of different metallicity distributions is smaller for the rates of BNSs and BHNSs, since their yield is less metallicitydependent.”
COSMIC Variance in Binary Population Synthesis (2019, background): “The impact of this change, particularly on DNS population properties, is explained in more detail in Zevin et al. (2019).”