Supermassive stars as a source of abundance anomalies of proton-capture elements in globular clusters

By P. Denissenkov, F. Hartwick. 2013

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose that the abundance anomalies of proton-capture elements in globular clusters, such as the C-N, Na-O, Mg-Al and Na-F anti-correlations, were produced by super-massive stars with M ~ 10,000 Msun. Such stars could form in the runaway collisions of massive stars that sank to the cluster center as a result of dynamical friction, or via the direct monolithic collapse of the low-metallicity gas cloud from which the cluster formed. To explain the observed abundance anomalies, we assume that the super-massive stars had lost significant parts of their initial masses when only a small mass fraction of hydrogen, Delta X ~ 0.15, was transformed into helium. We speculate that the required mass loss might be caused by the super-Eddington radiation continuum-driven stellar wind or by the diffusive mode of the Jeans instability.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f090d3f05c2023f902e46b5b9b1bebe371fa6fb

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

• The Hubble Space TelescopeUV Legacy Survey of Galactic Globular Clusters – V. Constraints on formation scenarios (2015, background): “Denissenkov & Hartwick (2014) and Denissenkov et al. (2015) build on the idea that within a young GC the most massive stars will sink to the center by dynamical friction and coalesce thre, hence forming a SMS of∼ 104 M⊙.”