Stellar adiabatic mass loss model and applications

TL;DR

This paper develops an adiabatic mass loss model for binary star evolution, aiding in understanding mass transfer stability and its application to different stellar masses and evolutionary stages.

Contribution

It introduces an adiabatic expansion model to simulate stellar responses during rapid mass transfer, improving binary evolution predictions.

Findings

Model applied to 1 Msun and 10 Msun stars.

Identified limitations for giant-branch stars.

Provides insights into mass transfer stability criteria.

Abstract

Roche-lobe overflow and common envelope evolution are very important in binary evolution, which is believed to be the main evolutionary channel to hot subdwarf stars. The details of these processes are difficult to model, but adiabatic expansion provides an excellent approximation to the structure of a donor star undergoing dynamical time scale mass transfer. We can use this model to study the responses of stars of various masses and evolutionary stages as potential donor stars, with the urgent goal of obtaining more accurate stability criteria for dynamical mass transfer in binary population synthesis studies. As examples, we describe here several models with the initial masses equal to 1 Msun and 10 Msun, and identify potential limitations to the use of our results for giant-branch stars.