Binary Interaction Dominates the Evolution of Massive Stars

By H. Sana, Selma de Mink, A. D. Koter, N. Langer, Christopher H. Evans, M. Gieles, E. Gosset, Robert G. Izzard, J. L. Bouquin, F. Schneider. Science, 2012

1,465 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Star Partners Stars more massive than eight times the mass of the Sun are rare and short-lived, yet they are fundamentally important because they produce all the heavy elements in the universe, such as iron, silicon, and calcium. Sana et al. (p. 444) examined the properties of a sample of ∼70 massive stars in six stellar clusters located nearby in our galaxy. Over half of the stars in the sample belong to a binary system and, during the course of their lifetimes, most of the stars in these binaries will interact with one another, either by merging or exchanging mass. Binary interaction may thus affect the evolution of the majority of massive stars. Analysis of a sample of massive stars in our Galaxy implies that most will interact with a nearby companion. The presence of a nearby companion alters the evolution of massive stars in binary systems, leading to phenomena such as stellar mergers, x-ray binaries, and gamma-ray bursts. Unambiguous constraints on the fraction of massive stars affected by binary interaction were lacking. We simultaneously measured all relevant binary characteristics in a sample of Galactic massive O stars and quantified the frequency and nature of binary interactions. More than 70% of all massive stars will exchange mass with a companion, leading to a binary merger in one-third of the cases. These numbers greatly exceed previous estimates and imply that binary interaction dominates the evolution of massive stars, with implications for populations of massive stars and their supernovae.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d0a564abfc8a074297c11272043b00d33c607268

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Citations in the corpus

Evolutionary roads leading to low effective spins, high black hole masses, and O1/O2 rates for LIGO/Virgo binary black holes (2017, methodology): “…into account additional effects of rotation as is done in model M20, we use the standard stellar winds from Vink et al. (2001) with addition of LBV winds from Belczynski et al. (2010a), and we employ the initial binary parameters from Sana et al. (2012) as discussed in de Mink & Belczynski (2015).”
PREPARING FOR AN EXPLOSION: HYDRODYNAMIC INSTABILITIES AND TURBULENCE IN PRESUPERNOVAE (2013, background): “Recent observations of mainsequence O-type stars have shown definitively that the majority of massive stars (roughly 2/3) are born in binary systems with a separation small enough that the two stars will interact before they die (Sana et al. 2012; Chini et al. 2012; Kiminki et al. 2012).”
RECONCILING THE STELLAR AND NEBULAR SPECTRA OF HIGH-REDSHIFT GALAXIES (2016, background): “In parallel, it has also been established that most massive stars do not evolve as single stars, but as part of binary systems (Crowther 2007; Sana et al. 2012).”
THE INCIDENCE OF STELLAR MERGERS AND MASS GAINERS AMONG MASSIVE STARS (2013, background): “1) that generously include the confidence interval quoted by Sana et al. (2012).”
MESA ISOCHRONES AND STELLAR TRACKS (MIST). I. SOLAR-SCALED MODELS (2016, background): “Multiplicity is extremely common among O- and B-type stars; binary mass exchange is believed to occur for & 70% of O-type stars and about a third of those stars will ultimately form a binary merger product (e.g., Chini et al. 2012; Sana et al. 2012, 2013; de Mink et al. 2014).”
ASTROPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE BINARY BLACK HOLE MERGER GW150914 (2016, background): “The fact that the majority of massive stars are members of binary systems with a roughly flat mass-ratio distribution (Kobulnicky & Fryer 2007; Sana et al. 2012; Kobulnicky et al. 2014) provides the opportunity for BBH formation in isolated binary systems.”
Luminous blue variables are antisocial: their isolation implies that they are kicked mass gainers in binary evolution (2014, background): “Interestingly, after analyzing the fraction of O-type stars that will interact and exchange mass, Sana et al. (2012) estimate that 1/3 is the approximate fraction of massive stars that we might expect to lose their H envelope in RLOF.”
Merging black hole binaries: the effects of progenitor's metallicity, mass-loss rate and Eddington factor (2017, methodology): “(9) We sampled the mass of the secondary m2 according to the distribution proposed by Sana et al. (2012) F(q) ∝ q−0.1 with q = m2 m1 ∈ [0.1−1] m1 , (10) We adopt the distributions proposed by Sana et al. (2012) also for the orbital period P and the eccentricity e: F(P) ∝ (P)−0.55 with P =…”
The origin of spin in binary black holes (2019, methodology): “The mass distribution of the less massive secondary star is given by m2 = m1q0 where q0 is the initial mass ratio (0 < q0 < 1) drawn from a flat distribution (Sana et al. 2012).”
SUPERNOVA LIGHT CURVES POWERED BY FALLBACK ACCRETION (2012, background): “Probably a bigger issue is that the calculations here are based on a limited set of stellar progenitors, and ignore the effects of rotation and binarity, which may be very common in massive stars (e.g., Sana et al. 2012).”
Theoretical uncertainties of the Type Ia supernova rate (2014, background): “Additionally, Kobulnicky & Fryer (2007) and Sana et al. (2012) find that more than 70% of massive stars are in binary systems.”
Merging binary black holes formed through chemically homogeneous evolution in short-period stellar binaries (2015, methodology): “The lower limit is chosen by estimating the likely minimum of the underlying distribution consistent with the shortest-period system in the observed sample of 34 binaries with constrained orbital periods (Sana et al. 2012) having a period of 1.41 days, or log10(P/days) = 0.15.”
The Close Binary Fraction of Solar-type Stars Is Strongly Anticorrelated with Metallicity (2018, background): “At solar metallicity, the observed binary fraction of massive stars is already large, i.e., ≈70% below a<10 au and nearly 100% within a<100 au (Sana et al. 2012, 2014; Moe & Di Stefano 2017; Section 6).”
Modeling Dense Star Clusters in the Milky Way and Beyond with the CMC Cluster Catalog (2019, background): “%) compared to the field ( fb50%; e.g., Sana et al. 2012; Kroupa & Jerabkova 2018).”
STARS, GAS, AND DARK MATTER IN THE SOLAR NEIGHBORHOOD (2015, background): “We define a “high-mass star” as one with m m mu h , and choose m 8h = so that the number of highmass stars corresponds to the number of core-collapse supernovae, neglecting the complications associated with binary evolution (Sana et al. 2012).”
The Observer's Guide to the Gamma-Ray Burst-Supernova Connection (2016, background): “There is a growing list of observations that show that most massive stars exist in binaries, including [474] who estimated that over 70% of all massive stars will exchange mass with a companion star, which in a third of all cases will lead to a merger of the binary system.”
Black Hole Mergers in Galactic Nuclei Induced by the Eccentric Kozai–Lidov Effect (2017, background): “This is consistent with Sana et al. (2012) distribution which favors short period binaries, although those BHs have already gone through stellar evolution and thus their exact distribution is unknown.”
The Wolf-Rayet stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud - A comprehensive analysis of the WN class (2014, background): “Moreover, a star which is currently single could be the product of binary evolution, e.g. a merger or a binary system where the companion already exploded (Sana et al. 2012).”