Ejecting the envelope of red supergiant stars with jets launched by an inspiraling neutron star

TL;DR

This paper investigates how jets launched by a neutron star spiraling inside a red supergiant's envelope can eject the star's envelope, challenging the formation of Thorne-Zytkow objects and suggesting new stellar evolution processes.

Contribution

It introduces a jet-feedback mechanism that significantly impacts common envelope evolution and proposes new scenarios for stellar explosions and nucleosynthesis inside red supergiants.

Findings

Jets can eject the entire envelope and part of the core during CE evolution.

Thorne-Zytkow objects are unlikely to form via standard CE evolution with high accretion rates.

Jets may facilitate r-process nucleosynthesis inside the star's core.

Abstract

We study the properties of jets launched by a neutron star spiralling inside the envelope and core of a red supergiant. We propose that Thorne-Zytkow objects (TZO) are unlikely to be formed via common envelope (CE) evolution if accretion on to the neutron star can exceed the Eddington rate with much of the accretion energy directed into jets that subsequently dissipate within the giant envelope. We use the jet-feedback mechanism, where energy deposited by the jets drives the ejection of the entire envelope and part of the core, and find a very strong interaction of the jets with the core material at late phases of the CE evolution. Following our results we speculate on two rare processes that might take place in the evolution of massive stars. (1) Recent studies have claimed that the peculiar abundances of the HV2112 RSG star can be explained if this star is a TZO. We instead speculate that the rich-calcium envelope comes from a supernova explosion of a stellar companion that was only slightly more massive than HV2112, such that during its explosion HV2112 was already a giant that intercepted a relatively large fraction of the SN ejecta. (2) We raise the possibility that strong r-process nucleosynthesis, where elements with high atomic weight of $A \ga 130$ are formed, occurs inside the jets that are launched by the NS inside the core of the RSG star.