Close Encounters of Star - Black Hole Binaries with Single Stars

TL;DR

This paper investigates the hydrodynamics of star-black hole binary encounters with single stars, revealing outcomes like stellar disruption, collision, and binary exchange, with implications for observable flares and stellar evolution.

Contribution

It advances understanding of three-body interactions beyond point-particle models by analyzing hydrodynamic outcomes and their observational signatures.

Findings

Five types of outcomes identified: disruption, collision, perturbation, exchange, triple formation.

Impact parameter and phase angle determine interaction violence and outcomes.

Stellar collision products are hotter, larger, and brighter than typical main sequence stars.

Abstract

Multi-body dynamical interactions of binaries with other objects are one of the main driving mechanisms for the evolution of star clusters. It is thus important to bring our understanding of three-body interactions beyond the commonly employed point-particle approximation. To this end we here investigate the hydrodynamics of three-body encounters between star-black hole (BH) binaries and single stars, focusing on the identification of final outcomes and their long-term evolution and observational properties, using the moving-mesh hydrodynamics code AREPO. This type of encounters produces five types of outcomes: stellar disruption, stellar collision, weak perturbation of the original binary, binary member exchange, and triple formation. The two decisive parameters are the binary phase angle, which determines which two objects meet at the first closest approach, and the impact parameter, which sets the boundary between violent and non-violent interactions. When the impact parameter is smaller than the semimajor axis of the binary, tidal disruptions and star-BH collisions frequently occur when the BH and the incoming star first meet, while the two stars mostly merge when the two stars meet first instead. In both cases, the BHs accrete from an accretion disk at super-Eddington rates, possibly generating flares luminous enough to be observed. The stellar collision products either form a binary with the BH or remain unbound to the BH. Upon collision, the merged stars are hotter and larger than main sequence stars of the same mass at similar age. Even after recovering their thermal equilibrium state, stellar collision products, if isolated, would remain hotter and brighter than main sequence stars until becoming giants.