Pulsational instability of supergiant protostars: Do they grow supermassive by accretion?

TL;DR

This study investigates whether supergiant protostars can grow into supermassive stars despite pulsational instabilities, finding that mass loss due to pulsations is insufficient to prevent their growth via rapid accretion.

Contribution

It provides the first linear stability analysis of supergiant protostars, demonstrating their potential for stable growth into supermassive stars.

Findings

Supergiant protostars with M>600 Msun are pulsationally unstable.

Mass-loss rates due to pulsations are much lower than accretion rates.

Supergiant protostars can grow stably via rapid accretion, leading to supermassive star formation.

Abstract

Supermassive stars (SMSs; M>10^5 Msun) and their remnant black holes are promising progenitors for supermassive black holes (SMBHs) observed in the early universe at z>7. It has been postulated that SMSs forms through very rapid mass accretion onto a protostar at a high rate exceeding 0.01 Msun/yr. According to recent studies, such rapidly accreting protostars evolve into "supergiant protostars", i.e. protostars consisting of a bloated envelope and a contracting core, similar to giant star. However, like massive stars as well as giant stars, both of which are known to be pulsationally unstable, supergiant protostars may also be also unstable to launch strong pulsation-driven outflows. If this is the case, the stellar growth via accretion will be hindered by the mass loss. We here study the pulsational stability of the supergiant protostars in the mass range M<10^3 Msun through the method of the linear perturbation analysis. We find that the supergiant protostars with M>600 Msun and very high accretion rate Mdot>1.0 Msun/yr are unstable due to the kappa mechanism. The pulsation is excited in the He^+ ionization layer in the envelope. Even under a conservative assumption that all the pulsation energy is converted into the kinetic energy of the outflows, the mass-loss rate is ~10^-3 Msun/yr, which is lower than the accretion rate by more than two orders of magnitude. We thus conclude that the supergiant protostars should grow stably via rapid accretion at least in the mass range we studied. As long as the rapid accretion is maintained in the later stage, protostars will become SMSs, which eventually produce seeds for the high-z SMBHs.