Rotational mixing in massive binaries - Detached short-period systems

By Selma de Mink, Matteo Cantiello, N. Langer, O. Pols, I. Brott, S.-C. Yoon. 2009

197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Models of rotating single stars can successfully account fo r a wide variety of observed stellar phenomena, such as the surface enhancements of N and He observed in massive main-sequence stars. However, recent observations have questioned the idea that ro tational mixing is the main process responsible for the surface enhancements, emphasizing the need for a strong and conclusive test for rotational mixing. We investigate the consequences of rotational mixing for massive main-sequence stars in short-period binaries. In the se systems the tides are thought to spin up the stars to rapid rotation, sync hronous with their orbital revolution. We use a state-of-th e-art stellar evolution code including the effect of rotational mixing, tides, and magnetic fields. We adop t a rotational mixing effi ciency that has been calibrated against observations of rotating stars und er the assumption that rotational mixing is the main process responsible for the observed surface abundances. We find that the primaries of massive close binaries ( M1≈ 20 M⊙, Porb. 3 days) are expected to show significant enhancements in nitrogen (up to 0.6 dex in the Small Magellanic Cloud) for a significant fraction of their core hydrogen-burning lifetime . We propose using such systems to test the concept of rotational mixing. As these short-period binaries often show eclipses, their p arameters can be determined with high accuracy. For the primary stars of more massive and very close systems ( M1≈ 50 M⊙, Porb. 2 days) we find that centrally produced helium is effi ciently mixed throughout the envelope. The star remains blue and compact during the main sequence evolution and stays within its Roche lobe. It is the less massive star, in which the effects of rotational mixing are less pronounced, which fills it s Roche lobe first, contrary to what standard binary evolution theory pre dicts. The primaries will appear as “Wolf-Rayet stars in dis guise”: core hydrogen-burning stars with strongly enhanced He and N at the surface. We propose that this evolution path provides an al ternative channel for the formation of tight Wolf-Rayet binaries with a main-sequence companion and might explain massive black hole binaries such as the intriguing system M33 X-7.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c02be7c473e63dba6a62c11420ce466d8bf3438c

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Michela Mapelli
2. Ilya Mandel
3. N. Giacobbo
4. Mario Spera
5. Selma de Mink
6. N. Langer
7. D. Holz
8. C. Conroy

Citations in the corpus

• The origin of spin in binary black holes (2019, background): “…massive stars in close orbits experiencing strong internal mixing go through chemically homogeneous evolution and produce massive BBHs (e.g., de Mink et al. 2009; Mandel & de Mink 2016; Marchant et al. 2016); dynamical formation (iv) in globular clusters and (v) galactic nuclear clusters where…”
• THE ROTATION RATES OF MASSIVE STARS: THE ROLE OF BINARY INTERACTION THROUGH TIDES, MASS TRANSFER, AND MERGERS (2012, background): “In the models by Petrovic et al. (2005) and de Mink et al. (2009b), it was assumed that accretion ceases when the star reaches the Keplerian limit.”
• THEORETICAL EVOLUTION OF OPTICAL STRONG LINES ACROSS COSMIC TIME (2013, background): “(5) In binary stars, efficient mass-transfer can spin-up the rotation of the companion star, causing similar mixing effects as in rotating isolated stars (de Mink et al. 2009; Eldridge & Stanway 2012).”
• Massive runaway and walkaway stars (2018, background): “It is also spun up to near to breakup rotation (Packet 1981; de Mink et al. 2009), and it is rejuvenated because of the increased mass and consequent growth of its convective core (Hellings 1983; Schneider et al. 2016).”
• Progenitors of gravitational wave mergers: binary evolution with the stellar grid-based code ComBinE (2018, background): “An alternative and novel formation channel of relative massive BH-BH binaries, which avoids the CE phase altogether, is the the CHE channel (e.g. de Mink et al. 2009; Marchant et al. 2016; Mandel & de Mink 2016).”
• The VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey XXVII. Physical parameters of B-type main-sequence binary systems in the Tarantula nebula (2017, unknown): “Indeed as discussed by de Mink et al. (2009, 2011), pre-interaction binaries ‘may provide the most stringent test cases for single stellar models’.”
• Stellar-mass black holes in young massive and open stellar clusters and their role in gravitational-wave generation (2016, background): “Furthermore, mass transfer and/or tidal interactions among massive-stellar and close primordial binaries would influence the masses of the BHs (Thomas Tauris, Philipp Podsiadlowski, private communications; see also De Mink et al. 2009; Marchant et al. 2016 in this context).”
• THE EFFECT OF METALLICITY ON THE DETECTION PROSPECTS FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVES (2010, background): “The smaller radial expansion of stars may also be caused by the high rotation that is usually induced by binarity or low stellar metallicity (Vazquez et al. 2007; de Mink et al. 2009), but the effects of rotation on stellar evolution are not included in our analysis.”
• The Effect of Stellar Rotation on Colour-Magnitude Diagrams: On the apparent presence of multiple populations in intermediate age stellar clusters (2009, methodology): “We use the same choices for the mixing parameters as De Mink et al. (2009), which were calibrated by Brott et al. (in prep).”
• Formation of Double Neutron Star Systems (2017, background): “…avoid any mass transfer until the first SN are generally so wide that they would easily break up at this stage (Section 6) — unless the stars evolve chemically homogeneously (e.g. de Mink et al. 2009; Marchant et al. 2016), in which case the orbit remains tight throughout the entire evolution.”
• Spectral population synthesis including massive binaries (2009, background): “To our knowledge only the code described by Cantiello et al. (2007) and de Mink et al. (2009) (and references there-in) does so, and is extremely computationally and human input intensive.”
• Merging binary black holes formed through chemically homogeneous evolution in short-period stellar binaries (2015, methodology): “SdM acknowledges Matteo Cantiello for starting the original discussion of the possibility of this channel leading to de Mink et al. (2009), and Sung-Chul Yoon for sharing the grid of models from Yoon et al. (2006).”
• Most Black Holes Are Born Very Slowly Rotating (2019, background): “MESA’s default Eddington-Sweet mixing scheme) and causes the star to evolve quasi-homogeneously (Maeder 1987; Woosley & Heger 2006; Yoon et al. 2006; de Mink et al. 2009; Mandel & de Mink 2016).”
• ASTROPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE BINARY BLACK HOLE MERGER GW150914 (2016, background): “…formation pathways, avoiding mass transfer and common envelope, may be possible if massive stars remain rapidly rotating, stay chemically homogeneous through their lifetimes, remain compact, and do not become giant stars (see de Mink et al. 2009; Mandel & de Mink 2016; Marchant et al. 2016).”
• Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “…for binary interactions, such as common-envelope physics, as well as mass transfer episodes (see reviews in Kalogera et al. 2007; Vanbeveren 2009; Postnov & Yungelson 2014) and, more recently, the effects of rapid rotation (de Mink et al. 2009; Mandel & de Mink 2016; Marchant et al. 2016).”
• Scaled solar tracks and isochrones in a large region of the Z-Y plane. II. From 2.5 to 20 solar masses (2009, background): “Regardless of the success of rotating stellar models in explaining a variety of stellar phenomena, rotational mixing is still a matter of debate (de Mink et al., 2009).”
• Rotating massive main-sequence stars: II. Simulating a population of LMC early B-type stars as a test of rotational mixing (2011, methodology): “We calculated a grid of 284 stellar evolution models past core hydrogen exhaustion using a one-dimensional hydrodynamic stellar evolution code, that includes the physics of differential rotation and magnetic fields as described in Paper I; see also Yoon et al. (2006) and de Mink et al. (2009).”