Precession and accretion in circumbinary discs: The case of HD 104237

TL;DR

This study uses SPH simulations to analyze how eccentric binary stars like HD 104237 influence their surrounding discs, causing cavity formation, precession, and periodic accretion variability, with implications for binary evolution.

Contribution

It demonstrates that binary-induced disc precession leads to predictable accretion variability, aligning well with analytic models and test particle simulations.

Findings

Binary clears a large cavity and induces disc eccentricity.

Disc precession period is approximately 40 years for HD 104237.

Accretion rates vary by an order of magnitude, with primary accreting more during half of the precession cycle.

Abstract

We present the results of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of the disc around the young, eccentric stellar binary HD 104237. We find that the binary clears out a large cavity in the disc, driving a significant eccentricity at the cavity edge. This then precesses around the binary at a rate of $\dot{\varpi} = 0.48^{\circ}T_{\mathrm{b}}^{-1}$, which for HD 104237 corresponds to 40 years. We find that the accretion pattern into the cavity and onto the binary changes with this precession, resulting in a periodic accretion variability driven purely by the physical parameters of the binary and its orbit. For each star we find that this results in order of magnitude changes in the accretion rate. We also find that the accretion variability allows the primary to accrete gas at a higher rate than the secondary for approximately half of each precession period. Using a large number of 3-body integrations of test particles orbiting different binaries, we find good agreement between the precession rate of a test particle and our SPH disc precession. These rates also agree very well with the precession rates predicted by the analytic theory of Leung & Lee (2013), showing that their prescription can be accurately used to predict long-term accretion variability timescales for eccentric binaries accreting from a disc. We discuss the implications of our result, and suggest that this process provides a viable way of preserving unequal mass ratios in accreting eccentric binaries in both the stellar and supermassive black hole regimes