The Evolution of Massive Helium Stars, Including Mass Loss

By Stan Woosley. Astrophysical Journal, 2019

171 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The evolution of helium stars with initial masses in the range 1.6–120 is studied, including the effects of mass loss by winds. These stars are assumed to form in binary systems when their expanding hydrogenic envelopes are promptly lost just after helium ignition. Significant differences are found with single-star evolution, chiefly because the helium core loses mass during helium burning rather than gaining it from hydrogen shell burning. Consequently, presupernova stars for a given initial mass function have considerably smaller mass when they die and will be easier to explode. Even accounting for this difference, the helium stars with mass loss develop more centrally condensed cores that should explode more easily than their single-star counterparts. The production of low-mass black holes may be diminished. Helium stars with initial masses below 3.2 experience significant radius expansion after helium depletion, reaching blue supergiant proportions. This could trigger additional mass exchange or affect the light curve of the supernova. The most common black hole mass produced in binaries is estimated to be about 9 . A new maximum mass for black holes derived from pulsational pair-instability supernovae is derived, 46 , and a new potential gap at 10–12 is noted. Models pertinent to SN 2014ft are presented, and a library of presupernova models is generated.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/abf4879a9d00f56aa131ed411fa0d3a481c97b70

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 Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

Constraints from Gravitational-wave Detections of Binary Black Hole Mergers on the 12C(α, γ)16O Rate (2020, background): “These shocks may unbind a portion of the outer stellar envelope, resulting in mass loss (Yoshida et al. 2016; Woosley 2019; Renzo et al. 2020a).”
COSMIC Variance in Binary Population Synthesis (2019, result): “Fit to the grid of simulations from Woosley (2019) (see Table 5), which agree reasonably well with those from Marchant et al. (2019) except that Woosley (2019) find slightly lower helium core masses undergo PPISN.”
The overarching framework of core-collapse supernova explosions as revealed by 3D fornax simulations (2019, background): “However, recent studies (Sukhbold et al. 2016, 2018; Woosley 2019) have called this simple picture into question, with slight “chaos” resulting in a non-monotonic dependence on the shallowness of the mass density profile in the crucial inner core.”