Constraining the helium-to-metal enrichment ratio $\Delta Y/\Delta Z$ from main sequence binary stars. Theoretical analysis of the accuracy and precision of the age and helium abundance estimates

TL;DR

This study assesses the potential to accurately determine the helium-to-metal enrichment ratio from binary star observations, revealing significant challenges due to observational uncertainties affecting the parameter's estimation.

Contribution

The paper provides a theoretical analysis showing the limitations and biases in estimating $ abla Y/ abla Z$ from binary star data under realistic observational errors.

Findings

Posterior distributions of $ abla Y/ abla Z$ are biased towards parameter bounds.

Systematic errors in temperature and metallicity hinder accurate $ abla Y/ abla Z$ estimation.

Age estimates remain unbiased with 10% precision despite biases in $ abla Y/ abla Z$.

Abstract

We investigated the theoretical possibility of accurately determining the helium-to-metal enrichment ratio $\Delta Y/\Delta Z$ from precise observations of double lined eclipsing binary systems. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we drew synthetic binary systems with masses between 0.85 and 1.00 $M_{\odot}$ from a grid of stellar models with $\Delta Y/\Delta Z = 2.0$ [...]. Subsequently, a broader grid with $\Delta Y/\Delta Z$ from 1.0 to 3.0 was used in the fitting process. To account for observational uncertainties, two scenarios were explored: S1 with realistic uncertainties of 100 K in temperature and 0.1 dex in [Fe/H], and S2 with halved uncertainties. We repeated the simulation at two baseline metallicities: [Fe/H] = 0.0 and -0.3. The posterior distributions of $\Delta Y/\Delta Z$ were severely biased towards the edge of the allowable range in the S1 errors scenario. The situation only marginally improved when considering the S2 scenario. The effect is due to the impact of changing $\Delta Y/\Delta Z$ in the stellar effective temperature and its interplay with [Fe/H] observational error, and it is therefore not restricted to the specific fitting method. Despite the presence of these systematic discrepancies, the age of the systems were recovered unbiased with 10% precision. Our findings indicate that the observational uncertainty in effective temperature and metallicity significantly hinders the accurate determination of the $\Delta Y/\Delta Z$ parameter from main sequence binary systems.