The Interaction of Stellar Objects within a Common Envelope

By Paul M. Ricker, R. Taam. 2007

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use high-resolution, three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations to study the hydrodynamic and gravitational interaction between stellar companions embedded within a differentially rotating common envelope. We evaluate the contributions of the nonaxisymmetric gravitational tides and ram pressure forces to the drag force and, hence, to the dissipation rate and the mass accumulated onto the stellar companion. We find that the gravitational drag dominates the hydrodynamic drag during the inspiral phase, implying that a simple prescription based on a gravitational capture radius significantly underestimates the dissipation rate and overestimates the inspiral decay timescale. Although the mass accretion rate fluctuates significantly, we observe a secular trend leading to an effective rate that is significantly less than the rate based on a gravitational capture radius. We discuss the implications of these results within the context of accretion by compact objects in the common-envelope phase.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/880a7ae11705f6ed9c61b96f17a89c78034f6c1c

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Citations in the corpus

Evolutionary roads leading to low effective spins, high black hole masses, and O1/O2 rates for LIGO/Virgo binary black holes (2017, background): “…of 10−2 with respect to the rates resulting from the Bondi-Hoyle approximation when the structure of the envelope (in particular, the density gradients around the inspiraling object) are taken into account (Ricker & Taam 2008; MacLeod et al. 2017; Murguia-Berthier et al. 2017; Holgado et al. 2018).”
RATES AND DELAY TIMES OF TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE (2009, background): “It is unclear at this point how the common envelope phase should best be treated in population synthesis studies, and currently detailed models are not sophisticated enough to explore the parameter space in detail (Ricker & Taam 2008).”
AN AMR STUDY OF THE COMMON-ENVELOPE PHASE OF BINARY EVOLUTION (2011, unknown): “A definitive understanding of the CE phase requires computationally intensive hydrodynamical simulations of which a number of recent studies have been carried out (e.g., Ricker & Taam 2008; Taam & Ricker 2010; Passy et al. 2012).”
Dawes Review 6: The Impact of Companions on Stellar Evolution (2016, background): “The number of models of the CE phase has increased in the recent years, but they are still far from being predictive (e.g., Ricker & Taam, 2008; Passy et al., 2012a; Ricker & Taam, 2012; Ohlmann et al., 2016a; Staff et al., 2016a; Ohlmann et al., 2016b; Iaconi et al., 2016).”
Binarity in carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars (2014, background): “It has been argued that pure Rochelobe overflow from an AGB star is usually unstable, and will lead to negligible accretion (Paczyński 1965; Ricker & Taam 2008).”
Wind Roche-lobe overflow: Application to carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars (2013, background): “When the donor is an AGB star, Roche-lobe overflow is typically unstable (Paczyński 1965) and will lead the binary system to a common envelope phase, with negligible accretion to the secondary (see Ricker & Taam 2008 for more details on accretion in a common envelope).”
On the α formalism for the common envelope interaction (2010, background): “This also makes sense in view of the fact that the transfer of orbital energy to the envelope is via gravitational drag (Ricker & Taam 2008): the companion creates a dense wake that slows it down and makes it fall in towards the giant’s core.”
SIMULATING THE COMMON ENVELOPE PHASE OF A RED GIANT USING SMOOTHED-PARTICLE HYDRODYNAMICS AND UNIFORM-GRID CODES (2011, methodology): “The final separations are found to be systematically higher than those deduced from observations, as is the case for the past simulations by Sandquist et al. (1998), De Marco et al. (2003) and Ricker & Taam (2008).”
Common envelope evolution: where we stand and how we can move forward (2012, background): “Recent hydrodynamic simulations of phase II have found non-local energy dissipation (Ricker and Taam 2008; Passy et al. 2012a); if those long-range effects continue to dominate beyond the initial dynamical spiral-in then it is less clear whether a self-regulating state is likely to form.”
The effect of pair-instability mass loss on black-hole mergers (2016, background): “During CE neutron stars and black holes accrete at 10% Bondi-Hoyle rate (Ricker & Taam 2008; MacLeod & Ramirez-Ruiz 2015).”