Synthetic horizontal branch morphology for different metallicities and ages under tidally enhanced stellar wind

TL;DR

This study models how tidally enhanced stellar winds during binary evolution influence the horizontal branch morphology of globular clusters across different metallicities and ages, revealing that metallicity and age significantly affect HB color distribution.

Contribution

It introduces a binary evolution model with tidally enhanced stellar winds to explain HB morphology variations due to metallicity and age in globular clusters.

Findings

HB becomes bluer with decreasing metallicity.

Older GCs have bluer HB morphology than younger ones.

Higher binary fractions tend to produce bluer HB morphology.

Abstract

It is believed that, except for metallicity, some other parameters are needed to explain the horizontal branch (HB) morphology of globular clusters (GCs). Furthermore, these parameters are considered to be correlated with the mass loss of the red giant branch (RGB) stars. In our previous work, we proposed that tidally enhanced stellar wind during binary evolution may affect the HB morphology by enhancing the mass loss of the red giant primary. As a further study, we now investigate the effects of metallicity and age on HB morphology by considering tidally enhanced stellar winds during binary evolution. We incorporated the tidally enhanced-stellar-wind model into Eggleton's stellar evolution code to study the binary evolution. To study the effects of metallicity and age on our final results, we conducted two sets of model calculations: (i) for a fixed age, we used three metallicities, namely Z=0.0001, 0.001, and 0.02. (ii) For a fixed metallicity, Z=0.001, we used five ages in our model calculations: 14, 13, 12, 10, and 7 Gyr. We found that HB morphology of GCs becomes bluer with decreasing metallicity, and old GCs present bluer HB morphology than young ones. These results are consistent with previous work. Although the envelope-mass distributions of zero-age HB stars produced by tidally enhanced stellar wind are similar for different metallicities, the synthetic HB under tidally enhanced stellar wind for Z=0.02 presented a distinct gap between red and blue HB. However, this feature was not seen clearly in the synthetic HB for Z=0.001 and 0.0001. We also found that higher binary fractions may make HB morphology become bluer, and we discussed the results with recent observations.