Rapidly rotating neutron star progenitors

TL;DR

This paper investigates the formation of rapidly rotating proto-neutron stars through stellar core mergers in common envelopes, assessing their potential as gravitational wave sources and estimating their formation rate.

Contribution

It introduces a new population synthesis model with core-envelope coupling to evaluate the fraction of cores leading to unstable proto-neutron stars after mergers.

Findings

Merging stellar cores can produce unstable proto-neutron stars.

The formation rate of such stars is approximately 0.1-1% of all core collapses.

The model's spin distribution aligns with observed young neutron stars.

Abstract

Rotating proto-neutron stars can be important sources of gravitational waves to be searched for by present-day and future interferometric detectors. It was demonstrated by Imshennik that in extreme cases the rapid rotation of a collapsing stellar core may lead to fission and formation of a binary proto-neutron star which subsequently merges due to gravitational wave emission. In the present paper, we show that such dynamically unstable collapsing stellar cores may be the product of a former merger process of two stellar cores in a common envelope. We applied population synthesis calculations to assess the expected fraction of such rapidly rotating stellar cores which may lead to fission and formation of a pair of proto-neutron stars. We have used the BSE population synthesis code supplemented with a new treatment of stellar core rotation during the evolution via effective core-envelope coupling, characterized by the coupling time, $\tau_c$. The validity of this approach is checked by direct MESA calculations of the evolution of a rotating 15 $M_\odot$ star. From comparison of the calculated spin distribution of young neutron stars with the observed one, reported by Popov and Turolla, we infer the value $\tau_c \simeq 5 \times 10^5$ years. We show that merging of stellar cores in common envelopes can lead to collapses with dynamically unstable proto-neutron stars, with their formation rate being $\sim 0.1-1\%$ of the total core collapses, depending on the common envelope efficiency.