NEUTRINO-DRIVEN WINDS IN THE AFTERMATH OF A NEUTRON STAR MERGER: NUCLEOSYNTHESIS AND ELECTROMAGNETIC TRANSIENTS

By D. Martin, Albino Perego, A. Arcones, Friedrich-Karl Thielemann, Oleg Korobkin, Stephan Rosswog. 2015

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a comprehensive nucleosynthesis study of the neutrino-driven wind in the aftermath of a binary neutron star merger. Our focus is the initial remnant phase when a massive central neutron star is present. Using tracers from a recent hydrodynamical simulation, we determine total masses and integrated abundances to characterize the composition of unbound matter. We find that the nucleosynthetic yields depend sensitively on both the life time of the massive neutron star and the polar angle. Matter in excess of up to 9 × 10−3 M⊙ becomes unbound until ∼200 ms. Due to electron fractions of Ye ≈ 0.2–0.4, mainly nuclei with mass numbers A < 130 are synthesized, complementing the yields from the earlier dynamic ejecta. Mixing scenarios with these two types of ejecta can explain the abundance pattern in r-process enriched metal-poor stars. Additionally, we calculate heating rates for the decay of the freshly produced radioactive isotopes. The resulting light curve peaks in the blue band after about 4 hr. Furthermore, high opacities due to heavy r-process nuclei in the dynamic ejecta lead to a second peak in the infrared after 3–4 days.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c3bb05a364a537d0b956dadfafe6b0ec85a92ce8

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Citations in the corpus

Signatures of hypermassive neutron star lifetimes on r-process nucleosynthesis in the disc ejecta from neutron star mergers (2017, methodology): “The nucleosynthesis in the disk outflow from a HMNS has also been studied by Martin et al. (2015), who focused on the neutrino-driven wind without the contribution from angular momentum transport.”
Dynamical Mass Ejection from Binary Neutron Star Mergers (2016, background): “…2009; Metzger & Fernández 2014; Fernández et al. 2015b; Foucart et al. 2015; Just et al. 2015; Martin et al. 2015), suggest that mergers are likely to eject a large amount of r-process material (Rosswog et al. 1999; Korobkin et al. 2012; Wanajo et al. 2014; Just et al. 2015; Martin et al. 2015).”
The cocoon emission - an electromagnetic counterpart to gravitational waves from neutron star mergers (2017, background): “The second, ε̇ = 2ε̇0, is expected at the relevant times (∼ 104 s) for a neutrino driven wind dominated by lighter (A < 130) elements (Perego et al. 2014a; Martin et al. 2015).”
AT 2017gfo: An Anisotropic and Three-component Kilonova Counterpart of GW170817 (2017, methodology): “The amount of wind ejecta (rel- ative to the disk mass) obtained for BFc is significantly above the results reported in Martin et al. (2015) for pure neutrino-driven winds, suggesting a non-negligible role of magnetically-driven winds, while the amount of secular ejecta is in agreement with the…”
Long-term GRMHD simulations of neutron star merger accretion discs: implications for electromagnetic counterparts (2018, background): “…involves mainly light r-process elements, with varying amounts of material with A > 130 depending on parameters such as the strength of angular momentum transport or the lifetime of a hypermassive neutron star (HMNS) (Just et al. 2015; Martin et al. 2015; Wu et al. 2016; Lippuner et al. 2017).”
Production of the entire range of r-process nuclides by black hole accretion disc outflows from neutron star mergers (2016, background): “Neutrino heating is much more important if the merger produces a long-lived HMNS (Dessart et al. 2009; Metzger & Fernández 2014; Perego et al. 2014; Martin et al. 2015), resulting in a larger ejecta mass with higher electron fraction, depending on the uncertain lifetime of such a remnant.”
A Magnetar Origin for the Kilonova Ejecta in GW170817 (2018, background): “…r-process nuclei (Li & Paczyński 1998; Metzger et al. 2010; Roberts et al. 2011; Barnes & Kasen 2013; Tanaka & Hotokezaka 2013; Grossman et al. 2014; Martin et al. 2015; Fontes et al. 2017; Wollaeger et al. 2017; Tanaka et al. 2018; also see Fernández & Metzger 2016; Metzger 2017 for reviews), a…”
Binary Neutron Star Mergers: Mass Ejection, Electromagnetic Counterparts, and Nucleosynthesis (2018, background): “The uncertainty includes variations due to the possible presence of a longer-lived remnant (e.g., Just et al. 2015; Martin et al. 2015).”
Neutron Star Extreme Matter Observatory: A kilohertz-band gravitational-wave detector in the global network (2020, background): “…(Zhang 2018), and the existence and lifetime of the remnant will reveal the impact of neutrino radiation on heavy-element formation through the rapid neutroncapture process in kilonovae (Metzger & Fernández 2014; Martin et al. 2015; Fernández et al. 2019; Kawaguchi, Shibata, & Tanaka 2020).”
Impact of ejecta morphology and composition on the electromagnetic signatures of neutron star mergers (2017, background): “If the collapse to a black hole (BH) is delayed, an intense neutrinoand accretion-driven wind is launched from the hot surface of the resulting hypermassive neutron star (HMNS, Dessart et al. 2009; Perego et al. 2014; Just et al. 2015; Martin et al. 2015).”
Constraining the Maximum Mass of Neutron Stars from Multi-messenger Observations of GW170817 (2017, background): “The disk outflows typically possess a broad distribution of Ye ∼ 0.1 − 0.5, with an average Ye that increases with the lifetime of the HMNS/SMNS, due to neutrino irradiation of the ejecta by the NS (Metzger & Fernández 2014; Perego et al. 2014; Martin et al. 2015).”
Mass Ejection from the Remnant of a Binary Neutron Star Merger: Viscous-radiation Hydrodynamics Study (2017, background): “Pair-annihilation heating has not been considered in most recent works (e.g., Martin et al. 2015; Lippuner et al. 2017).”
Origin of the heaviest elements: The rapid neutron-capture process (2019, background): “For higher Ye ejecta, the heating rate has ‘bumps’ as a function of time caused by being dominated by a few nuclei (Grossman et al., 2014; Martin et al., 2015; Lippuner and Roberts, 2015; Rosswog et al., 2018; Wanajo, 2018).”