The Progenitor Stars of Gamma-Ray Bursts

By Stan Woosley, Alexander Heger. 2005

734 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Those massive stars that give rise to gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) during their deaths must be endowed with an unusually large amount of angular momentum in their inner regions, 1-2 orders of magnitude greater than the ones that make common pulsars. Yet the inclusion of mass loss and angular momentum transport by magnetic torques during the precollapse evolution is known to sap the core of the necessary rotation. Here we explore the evolution of very rapidly rotating massive stars, including stripped-down helium cores that might result from mergers or mass transfer in a binary, and single stars that rotate unusually rapidly on the main sequence. For the highest possible rotation rates (about 400 km s-1), a novel sort of evolution is encountered in which single stars mix completely on the main sequence, never becoming red giants. Such stars, essentially massive "blue stragglers," produce helium-oxygen cores that rotate unusually rapidly. Such stars might comprise roughly 1% of all stars above 10 M☉ and can, under certain circumstances, retain enough angular momentum to make GRBs. Because this possibility is very sensitive to mass loss, GRBs are much more probable in regions of low metallicity.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a2c7e204c7daf29db33e402c0ade04330ddd551b

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. B. Metzger
3. Stan Woosley
4. S. Smartt
5. N. Smith
6. E. Berger
7. N. Langer
8. E. Quataert

In Computational Mechanics

1. Stan Woosley
2. N. Langer
3. P. Crowther
4. G. Meynet
5. R. Hirschi
6. T. Piran
7. Christian D. Ott
8. Sung-Chul Yoon

Citations in the corpus

• The Proto-Magnetar Model for Gamma-Ray Bursts (2010, background): “Dessart et al. (2008), hereafter D08, calculate the collapse of a rotating 35M⊙ ZAMS collapsar progenitor of Woosley & Heger (2006), which they endow with a precollapse magnetic field that results in a ∼ 1015 G field strength when compressed to NS densities.”
• THE PROPAGATION OF RELATIVISTIC JETS IN EXTERNAL MEDIA (2011, background): “Prior to the breakout the jet propagates inside the star which is considered to be massive (M ∼ 10M⊙) and rather compact (R ∼ R⊙) Wolf Rayet star (e.g. Woosley & Heger 2006; Crowther 2007).”
• The chemically homogeneous evolutionary channel for binary black hole mergers: rates and properties of gravitational-wave events detectable by advanced LIGO (2016, background): “This mode of evolution gained renewed attention in the context of the formation of the progenitors of long gamma-ray bursts from rapidly rotating single stars (Yoon & Langer 2005; Woosley & Heger 2006).”
• The Observer's Guide to the Gamma-Ray Burst-Supernova Connection (2016, background): “To date, the best theoretical stellar models find it hard to produce enough angular momentum in the core at the time of collapse to make a centrifugally supported disk, though some progress has been made [382, 383, 468].”
• Black Hole Spin via Continuum Fitting and the Role of Spin in Powering Transient Jets (2013, background): “…the spins of stellar black holes is crucial for example in constraining models of gamma-ray burst sources (Woosley 1993; MacFadyen & Woosley 1999; Woosley & Heger 2006); supernovae and black hole formation (Lee et al. 2002; Wong et al. 2012); exotic black hole states and state transitions…”
• Grids of stellar models with rotation - II. WR populations and supernovae/GRB progenitors at Z = 0.014 (2012, background): “This underlines, as already emphasised in previous works (seee.g. Hirschi et al. 2004, 2005; Woosley & Heger 2006), how important it is to properly account for angular momentum transfer during the MS phase.”
• DIMENSION AS A KEY TO THE NEUTRINO MECHANISM OF CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVA EXPLOSIONS (2010, neutral): “M progenitor of Woosley & Heger (2006).”
• MESA ISOCHRONES AND STELLAR TRACKS (MIST). I. SOLAR-SCALED MODELS (2016, background): “…combined with the non-negligible effects of radiation pressure, can significantly alter their evolution (e.g., Heger et al. 2000; Meynet & Maeder 2000; Hirschi et al. 2004; Woosley & Heger 2006; Yoon et al. 2006; de Mink et al. 2010; Georgy et al. 2012; Langer 2012; Köhler et al. 2015).”
• Nucleosynthesis and remnants in massive stars of solar metallicity (2007, background): “All these assumptions are questionable for rapidly rotating stars, especially45 so in small fraction of massive stars that become gamma-ray bursts (e.g., Woosley and Heger, 2006).”
• Pulsational Pair-instability Supernovae (2016, methodology): “For surface hydrogen mass fractions less than 0.4, the treatment was the same as Woosley & Heger (2006), including a metallicity scaling of Z0.”
• Long γ-Ray Bursts and Type Ic Core-Collapse Supernovae Have Similar Locations in Hosts (2007, background): “…in one direction, perhaps because of a low abundance of heavy elements (Modjaz et al. 2008), the result may be a massive Wolf-Rayet star with no surface H or He, a compact envelope, and high angular momentum at the time of collapse that can become a LGRB (Yoon & Langer 2005; Woosley & Heger 2006).”
• A MODEL FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVE EMISSION FROM NEUTRINO-DRIVEN CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVAE (2009, background): “However, the rotation rates necessary for GWs with sizeable amplitudes are likely to obtain in only ∼1% of the massive star population (Heger et al. 2005; Hirschi et al. 2004; Woosley & Heger 2006; Ott et al. 2006b).”
• CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVAE FROM 9 TO 120 SOLAR MASSES BASED ON NEUTRINO-POWERED EXPLOSIONS (2015, result): “Another model, not shown, with an angular momentum 50% of W18, gave almost identical results to W18x, showing that W18 itself was on the verge of becoming a chemically homogeneous model (Maeder 1987; Langer 1992; Woosley & Heger 2006).”
• Merging binary black holes formed through chemically homogeneous evolution in short-period stellar binaries (2015, background): “This peculiar evolutionary path gained renewed attention when Yoon & Langer (2005) and Woosley & Heger (2006) proposed it as a way to produce the rapidly spinning massive helium progenitors of long gamma-ray bursts in the collapsar scenario (Woosley 1993).”
• Mass fall-back and accretion in the central engine of gamma-ray bursts (2008, methodology): “The lower left panel shows τ ≡ d ln ρ/d ln r, as a function of M(r) (sharp glitches in τ are associated with composition changes), and the lower-right panel shows the angular velocity (not from the evolutionary calculation of Woosley & Heger 2006).”
• A new method for estimating the bolometric properties of Ibc supernovae (2013, background): “The first are the quasi-chemically homogeneous stellar models of Yoon & Langer (2005) and Woosley & Heger (2006), which involve rapidly rotating single stars.”
• OPTICAL SPECTRA OF 73 STRIPPED-ENVELOPE CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVAE (2014, background): “…remains, however, whether GRB-SNe Ic are a separate class of SNe Ic-bl requiring specific conditions (e.g., low metallicity; Yoon & Langer 2005; Woosley & Heger 2006; Stanek et al. 2006; Modjaz et al. 2008a) and/or constitute the extreme end of a continuum of SN Ic events, dictated by, for…”
• THE HOST GALAXIES OF GAMMA-RAY BURSTS. II. A MASS–METALLICITY RELATION FOR LONG-DURATION GAMMA-RAY BURST HOST GALAXIES (2010, background): “…that LGRBs follow a strict “cut-off” metallicity for their host galaxies (Wolf & Podsiadlowski 2007, Modjaz et al. 2008, Kocevski et al. 2009), and that a low metallicity is critical to generating a rapidly-rotating progenitor (e.g. Meynet & Maeder 2005, Woosley & Heger 2006, Yoon et al. 2006).”