THE ROTATION RATES OF MASSIVE STARS: THE ROLE OF BINARY INTERACTION THROUGH TIDES, MASS TRANSFER, AND MERGERS

By Selma de Mink, N. Langer, Robert G. Izzard, H. Sana, A. D. Koter. 2012

299 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rotation is thought to be a major factor in the evolution of massive stars—especially at low metallicity—with consequences for their chemical yields, ionizing flux, and final fate. Deriving the birth spin distribution is of high priority given its importance as a constraint on theories of massive star formation and as input for models of stellar populations in the local universe and at high redshift. Recently, it has become clear that the majority of massive stars interact with a binary companion before they die. We investigate how this affects the distribution of rotation rates, through stellar winds, expansion, tides, mass transfer, and mergers. For this purpose, we simulate a massive binary-star population typical for our Galaxy assuming continuous star formation. We find that, because of binary interaction, 20+5−10% of all massive main-sequence stars have projected rotational velocities in excess of 200 km s−1. We evaluate the effect of uncertain input distributions and physical processes and conclude that the main uncertainties are the mass transfer efficiency and the possible effect of magnetic braking, especially if magnetic fields are generated or amplified during mass accretion and stellar mergers. The fraction of rapid rotators we derive is similar to that observed. If indeed mass transfer and mergers are the main cause for rapid rotation in massive stars, little room remains for rapidly rotating stars that are born single. This implies that spin-down during star formation is even more efficient than previously thought. In addition, this raises questions about the interpretation of the surface abundances of rapidly rotating stars as evidence for rotational mixing. Furthermore, our results allow for the possibility that all early-type Be stars result from binary interactions and suggest that evidence for rotation in explosions, such as long gamma-ray bursts, points to a binary origin.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dfa6f6141152d35480694cd9c6d26ea488a797a1

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Citations in the corpus

Massive runaway and walkaway stars (2018, methodology): “However, changing the initial rotation rate has almost no impact on our results because binary interaction processes overwrite it (de Mink et al. 2013).”
THE GALACTIC O-STAR SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY (GOSSS). II. BRIGHT SOUTHERN STARS (2013, background): “This could be because they have a higher chance of being runaways (because they are older on average than dwarfs) or, perhaps more interestingly, because some of them are the result of mergers (de Mink et al. 2013).”
Classical Be stars (2013, background): “…from spectroscopic data increased (Baade 1992), companions were indeed found, but these were not filling their Roche lobes (see, e.g., references in Harmanec et al. 2002a), although some have been in the past and underwent spinup (see, e.g., de Mink et al. 2013, for the physics involved).”
THE INCIDENCE OF STELLAR MERGERS AND MASS GAINERS AMONG MASSIVE STARS (2013, methodology): “To model the effect of stellar evolution and binary interaction we employ a synthetic binary evolution code that is described in detail in de Mink et al. (2013) and references therein (hereafter Paper I).”
Mass Loss: Its Effect on the Evolution and Fate of High-Mass Stars (2014, background): “This, in turn, suggests that influence of rotation and rotational mixing in current single-star models may be overstimated (de Mink et al. 2013, Vanbeveren 2009).”
MESA ISOCHRONES AND STELLAR TRACKS (MIST). I. SOLAR-SCALED MODELS (2016, background): “…that have not been taken into account in our models, such as mass loss and gain from binary mass transfer (see e.g., Eldridge et al. 2008; de Mink et al. 2009, 2013), and typical measurement uncertainties are quite large: 1000 K for Teff, 0.1–0.2 dex for log(g), and 0.2 dex for the N/H…”
Delay-time distribution of core-collapse supernovae with late events resulting from binary interaction (2017, methodology): “We include updated mass-loss prescriptions as described in de Mink et al. (2013), which include the recipes of Vink et al. (2000).”
Fundamental properties of core-collapse Supernova and GRB progenitors: predicting the look of massive stars before death (2013, background): “Since a significant fraction of massive stars are in binary systems (e.g. Sana et al. 2012), it would not be surprising if a sizable fraction of core-collapse SN progenitors evolve under the influence of a close companion, for instance via tides and mass transfer (de Mink et al. 2013).”
Formation of Double Neutron Star Systems (2017, background): “The accretion process leads to a spin-up of the mass gainer, which is expected to end up spinning close to critical rotation (Packet 1981; Habets 1986; de Mink et al. 2013), and to a net widening of the orbit.”
The R136 star cluster dissected with Hubble Space Telescope/STIS. I. Far-ultraviolet spectroscopic census and the origin of He II λ1640 in young star clusters (2016, background): “R136 differs from the Quintuplet and Arches clusters in the sense that the luminous O stars also appear young, yet the He-enrichment of WN5h stars favours ages of ∼1.5 Myr and unusually rapid rotation, the latter predicted by stellar mergers (de Mink et al. 2013).”
Stellar population effects on the inferred photon density at reionization (2015, background): “This spin-up of stars by this transfer can result in the rotational mixing of its layers, allowing the more efficient burning of hydrogen in its interior (Cantiello et al. 2007; de Mink et al. 2013).”
The Magnetar Model for Type I Superluminous Supernovae. I. Bayesian Analysis of the Full Multicolor Light-curve Sample with MOSFiT (2017, background): “De Mink et al. (2013) further modeled the observed distribution in v isin for OB stars.”
Merging binary black holes formed through chemically homogeneous evolution in short-period stellar binaries (2015, background): “Several studies of the effects of rotation on massive stars in binary systems have been undertaken (e.g., Cantiello et al. 2007; de Mink et al. 2009, 2013; Song et al. 2013, 2016), but the implications for the formation of double compact objects have not yet been fully considered.”
Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “The core rotational angular momentum before the supernova can be changed from the birth spin of the progenitor by several processes(Langer 2012; de Mink et al. 2013; Amaro-Seoane & Chen 2016).”
Hierarchical analysis of gravitational-wave measurements of binary black hole spin–orbit misalignments (2017, background): “…2015), the strength of stellar winds in massive stars (Belczynski et al. 2010), the effect of rotation of massive stars on stellar evolution (de Mink et al. 2013; Ramı́rez-Agudelo et al. 2015), the natal kicks (if any) given to BHs (Repetto et al. 2012; Mandel 2016; Mirabel 2016; Repetto et…”
MODULES FOR EXPERIMENTS IN STELLAR ASTROPHYSICS (MESA): BINARIES, PULSATIONS, AND EXPLOSIONS (2015, methodology): “To compute the specific angular momentum carried by accreted material, we consider the possibility of both ballistic and Keplerian disk mass transfer (e.g., Marsh et al. 2004; de Mink et al. 2013).”
The IACOB project - I. Rotational velocities in northern Galactic O- and early B-type stars revisited. The impact of other sources of line-broadening (2013, background): “Nowadays, we count on a interesting scenario to explain this result (de Mink et al., 2013).”