HYDROGEN BURNING ON ACCRETING WHITE DWARFS: STABILITY, RECURRENT NOVAE, AND THE POST-NOVA SUPERSOFT PHASE

By W. M. Wolf, L. Bildsten, J. Brooks, B. Paxton. 2013

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the properties of white dwarfs (WDs) accreting hydrogen-rich matter in and near the stable burning regime of accretion rates as modeled by time-dependent calculations done with Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA). We report the stability boundary for WDs of masses between 0.51 M☉ and 1.34 M☉ as found via time-dependent calculations. We also examine recurrent novae that are accreting at rates close to, but below, the stable burning limit and report their recurrence times. Our dense grid in accretion rates finds the expected minimum possible recurrence times as a function of the WD mass. This enables inferences to be made about the minimum WD mass possible to reach a specific recurrence time. We compare our computational models of post-outburst novae to the stably burning WDs and explicitly calculate the duration and effective temperature (Teff) of the post-nova WD in the supersoft phase. We agree with the measured turnoff time–Teff relation in M31 by Henze and collaborators, infer WD masses in the 1.0–1.3 M☉ range, and predict ejection masses consistent with those observed. We close by commenting on the importance of the hot helium layer generated by stable or unstable hydrogen burning for the short- and long-term evolution of accreting WDs.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f56b4c94f098abc774743ff0003c225063159578

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. Fuller
2. Matteo Cantiello
3. P. Marchant
4. N. Langer
5. B. Paxton
6. D. Maoz
7. F. Mannucci
8. R. Townsend

In Instrumentation

1. D. Maoz
2. F. Mannucci
3. N. Langer
4. G. Nelemans
5. P. Marchant
6. J. Fuller
7. B. Paxton
8. R. Townsend

Citations in the corpus

• MODULES FOR EXPERIMENTS IN STELLAR ASTROPHYSICS (MESA): BINARIES, PULSATIONS, AND EXPLOSIONS (2015, background): “These hitherto unpublished advancements have already enabled a number of studies in interacting binary systems (Wolf et al. 2013; Pavlovskii & Ivanova 2015; Vos et al. 2015) and stellar pulsations (Pápics et al. 2014; Stello et al. 2014; Quinn et al. 2015; Cunha et al. 2015), and led to the…”
• On the Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae (2018, unknown): “Consequently, the theoretical consensus has generally been that for the WD to actually grow in mass while accreting hydrogen-rich material, it needs to accrete at a rate in the range that will result in stable burning—where the rate at which hydrogen is transformed into helium is equal to the accret”
• Observational Clues to the Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae (2013, background): “Newsham, Starrfield & Timmes (2013) and Wolf et al. (2013), on the other hand, do find steady burning, and WD mass growth, but again that a hot helium layer ignites at some point, possibly ejecting much of the accumulated mass. Alternatively, the donor may be a helium-rich star, avoiding the…”