V1309 Scorpii: merger of a contact binary

By R. Tylenda, M. Hajduk, T. Kamiński, A. Udalski, I. Soszyński, M. Szymański, M. Kubiak, G. Pietrzyński, R. Poleski, Ł. Wyrzykowski and 1 more. 2010

369 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Context. Stellar mergers are expected to take place in numerous circumstences in the evolution of stellar systems. In particular, they are considered as a plausible origin of stellar eruptions of the V838 Mon type. V 1309 Sco is the most recent eruption of this type in our Galaxy. The object was discovered in September 2008. Aims. Our aim is to investigate the nature of V 1309 Sco. Methods. V 1309 Sco has been photometrically observed in course of the OGLE project since August 2001. We analyse these observations in different ways. In particular, periodogram analyses were done to investigate the nature of the observed short-term variability of the progenitor. Results. We find that the progenitor of V 1309 Sco was a contact binary with an orbital period of ∼1.4 day. This period was decreasing with time. The light curve of the binary was also evolving, indicating that the system evolved towards its merger. The violent phase of the merger, marked by the systematic brightenning of the object, began in March 2008, i.e. half a year before the outburst discovery. We also investigate the observations of V 1309 Sco during the outburst and the decline and show that they can be fully accounted for within the merger hypothesis. Conclusions. For the first time in the literature we show from direct observations that contact binaries indeed end up by merging into a single object, as was suggested in numerous theoretical studies of these systems. Our study also shows that stellar mergers indeed result in eruptions of the V838 Mon type.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef740fd3ee5358f1f7b8f2b600b100ae304a9359

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Citations in the corpus

THE ROTATION RATES OF MASSIVE STARS: THE ROLE OF BINARY INTERACTION THROUGH TIDES, MASS TRANSFER, AND MERGERS (2012, background): “…rate of both components can be drastically affected, by tides (e.g., Zahn 1975; Hut 1981; de Mink et al. 2009a), mass transfer (e.g., Packet 1981; Pols et al. 1991; Petrovic et al. 2005; Dervişoǧlu et al. 2010), or when the two stars merge (e.g., Podsiadlowski et al. 1992; Tylenda et al. 2011).”
BLACK HOLE TRIPLE DYNAMICS: A BREAKDOWN OF THE ORBIT AVERAGE APPROXIMATION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVE DETECTIONS (2013, background): “…binaries are known to be a possible source of blue struggles in GCs (Perets & Fabrycky 2009), they might produce a population of rejuvenated stars at the Galactic center (Antonini et al. 2011), and result in optical (e.g., Tylenda et al. 2011) and X-ray (Antonini et al. 2010b) transient events.”
Common envelope evolution: where we stand and how we can move forward (2012, background): “At its peak in September 2008, the object was ∼6 magnitudes brighter than before the outburst (Tylenda et al. 2011).”
Modeling Dense Star Clusters in the Milky Way and Beyond with the CMC Cluster Catalog (2019, background): “In some cases, the postcollision evolution of these events may be observed as optical transients (e.g., Tylenda et al. 2011; MacLeod et al. 2017; Metzger & Pejcha 2017).”
Merging Binaries in the Galactic Center: The eccentric Kozai-Lidov mechanism with stellar evolution (2016, background): “…of these merged products is still unclear, we can only speculate, based on MNRAS 000, 1–12 (2016) observations of dusty binary mergers (e.g., Tylenda et al. 2011a,b, 2013; Nicholls et al. 2013) and the current state of common envelope evolution theory (see for review Ivanova et al. 2013),…”
DOUBLE COMPACT OBJECTS. III. GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE DETECTION RATES (2015, positive): “However, an assumed rarity of CE systems would be difficult to reconcile with observational evidence pointing to systems (for example, V1309 Sco, V4332 Sgr, OGLE 2002-BLG-360 or CK Vul) which seem to have developed a CE (e.g., Martini et al. 1999; Tylenda et al. 2011, 2013).”
Delay-time distribution of core-collapse supernovae with late events resulting from binary interaction (2017, background): “The simulations of Gaburov et al. (2008) and Glebbeek et al. (2013) suggest that the merger product that forms will initially be a puffed up and red object (Tylenda et al. 2011; Pejcha et al. 2016), but as it radiates away the excess energy, it will recover a thermal equilibrium structure.”
THE INCIDENCE OF STELLAR MERGERS AND MASS GAINERS AMONG MASSIVE STARS (2013, background): “Recently, the merger of a close binary system, although at lower mass, was caught in the act as the transient V1309 Sco (Tylenda et al. 2011).”
Dawes Review 6: The Impact of Companions on Stellar Evolution (2016, background): “The best studied example is V1309 Sco (Tylenda et al., 2011a, Figure 15), a system discovered serendipitously, but which is in the OGLE field of view hence has a long baseline of pre-outburst observations.”