The White Dwarf Mass-Orbital Period Relation Under Wind Mass Loss

TL;DR

This paper investigates how tidally enhanced stellar winds affect the relation between white dwarf mass and orbital period in binary systems, revealing increased scatter and lower-mass white dwarfs than traditional models predict.

Contribution

It introduces a binary evolution model incorporating tidally enhanced winds, demonstrating their impact on the white dwarf mass-orbital period relation and explaining observed deviations.

Findings

Tidally enhanced winds cause significant scatter in the $M_{WD}$-$P_{orb}$ relation.

Enhanced winds can produce lower-mass HeWDs at given orbital periods.

More observations are needed to validate the wind enhancement model.

Abstract

Helium white dwarfs (HeWDs) are thought to form from low-mass red giant stars experiencing binary interaction. Because the helium core mass of a red giant star is closely related to the stellar radius, there exists well-known relation between the orbital period ($P_{\rm orb}$) and the mass ($M_{\rm WD}$) of the HeWDs, which is almost independent of the type of the companion star. Traditional derivation of the $M_{\rm WD}$-$P_{\rm orb}$ relation generally neglected the effect of wind mass loss from the red giants, while observations show that wind mass loss from red giants in binary systems is systematically higher than that from isolated stars. In this work, we calculate binary evolution with tidally enhanced stellar wind (TEW) and find that it causes significantly scatter of the traditional $M_{\rm WD}$-$P_{\rm orb}$ relation. The TEW can prevent the red giants from overflowing their Roche lobes and slow down the growth of the helium core, leaving a lower-mass HeWD for given orbital period. This scenario may account for some of the HeWD binaries that deviate from the traditional $M_{\rm WD}$-$P_{\rm orb}$ relation. However, we point out that observations of more HeWD binaries in wide orbits are needed to test the TEW model and to constrain the enhanced wind factor.