Forming short-period Wolf–Rayet X-ray binaries and double black holes through stable mass transfer

By E. V. D. Heuvel, S. P. Portegies Zwart, Selma de Mink. 2017

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that black hole high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) with O- orB-type donor stars and relatively short orbital periods, of order oneweek to several months may survive spiral-in, to then form Wolf-Rayet(WR) X-ray binaries with orbital periods of order a day to a few days;while in systems where the compact star is a neutron star, HMXBs withthese orbital periods never survive spiral-in. We therefore predict thatWR X-ray binaries can only harbour black holes. The reason why blackhole HMXBs with these orbital periods may survive spiral-in is: thecombination of a radiative envelope of the donor star and a high mass ofthe compact star. In this case, when the donor begins to overflow itsRoche lobe, the systems are able to spiral in slowly with stable Rochelobe overflow, as is shown by the system SS433. In this case, thetransferred mass is ejected from the vicinity of the compact star(so-called isotropic re-emission mass-loss mode, or SS433-likemass-loss), leading to gradual spiral-in. If the mass ratio of donor andblack hole is ≳3.5, these systems will go into common-envelopeevolution and are less likely to survive. If they survive, they produceWR X-ray binaries with orbital periods of a few hours to one day.Several of the well-known WR+O binaries in our Galaxy and the MagellanicClouds, with orbital periods in the range between a week and severalmonths, are expected to evolve into close WR-black hole binaries, whichmay later produce close double black holes. The galactic formation rateof double black holes resulting from such systems is still uncertain, asit depends on several poorly known factors in this evolutionary picture.It might possibly be as high as ˜10-5 yr-1.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c79da05694c015a929b26eb5c4ce4282e835a53c

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Citations in the corpus

Massive runaway and walkaway stars (2018, background): “…is not accreted is assumed to leave the system with the specific angular momentum of the orbit of the accretor (e.g., Soberman et al. 1997; van den Heuvel et al. 2017), h = γRLOFJorb/(Mdon + Macc), with γRLOF = Mdon/Macc, where Jorb is the orbital angular momentum, Mdon and Macc the donor and…”
One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes Using Multiple Formation Pathways (2020, background): “However, theoretical models have shown that hardened BBH systems merging within a Hubble time can also form through late-phase stable mass transfer (van den Heuvel et al. 2017; Neijssel et al. 2019).”
The effect of the metallicity-specific star formation history on double compact object mergers (2019, unknown): “The potential importance of this formation channel and the stability of mass transfer is discussed in previous studies (see for example Pavlovskii et al. 2017; van den Heuvel et al. 2017, and references therein).”
Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “Consequently, mass transfer could harden the binary (van den Heuvel et al., 2017), and could even become dynamically unstable, leading to the formation of a common envelope (Paczynski, 1976).”
Formation and Evolution of Compact-object Binaries in AGN Disks (2019, background): “…al. 2016; Giacobbo et al. 2018; Bavera et al. 2019; Spera et al. 2019) accompanied by mass transfer (Inayoshi et al. 2017a; Pavlovskii et al. 2017; van den Heuvel et al. 2017), common-envelope ejection (e.g., Paczynski 1976; Ivanova et al. 2013), envelope expansion (Tagawa et al. 2018), or…”
The spin of the second-born black hole in coalescing binary black holes (2018, background): “…Phinney 1991; Tutukov & Yungelson 1993; Belczynski et al. 2016; Tutukov & Cherepashchuk 2017), a stable, non-conservative mass-transfer phase (van den Heuvel et al. 2017; Inayoshi et al. 2017), or spend their whole lives in close orbits and evolve chemically homogeneously (de Mink & Mandel 2016;…”
The origin of spin in binary black holes (2019, background): “…published by EDP Sciences A97, page 1 of 18 of the first-born BH goes through stable mass transfer avoiding the CE phase (e.g., van den Heuvel et al. 2017; Pavlovskii et al. 2017; Inayoshi et al. 2017), (iii) massive stars in close orbits experiencing strong internal mixing go through…”