The impact of asteroseismically calibrated internal mixing on nucleosynthetic wind yields of massive stars

TL;DR

This study investigates how internal mixing calibrated by asteroseismology affects the nucleosynthetic wind yields of massive stars, revealing significant impacts on stellar evolution and supernova characteristics.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate asteroseismic internal mixing profiles into stellar models, showing their influence on nucleosynthesis and stellar evolution beyond the main sequence.

Findings

Asteroseismic mixing leads to different wind yields compared to rotational mixing.

Enhanced mixing causes earlier carbon burning and affects supernova properties.

Models with seismic mixing show longer helium burning phases and lighter cores.

Abstract

Asteroseismology gives us the opportunity to look inside stars and determine their internal properties. Based on these observations, estimations can be made for the amount of the convective boundary mixing and envelope mixing of such stars, and the shape of the mixing profile in the envelope. However, these results are not typically included in stellar evolution models. We aim to investigate the impact of varying convective boundary mixing and envelope mixing in a range based on asteroseismic modelling in stellar models, both for the stellar structure and for the nucleosynthetic yields. In this first study, we focus on the pre-explosive evolution of a 20Msun star and evolve the models to the final phases of carbon burning. We vary the convective boundary mixing, implemented as step-overshoot, with the overshoot parameter in the range 0.05-0.4 and the amount of envelope mixing in the range 1-10$^{6}$ with a mixing profile based on internal gravity waves. We use a large nuclear network of 212 isotopes to study the nucleosynthesis. We find that enhanced mixing according to asteroseismology of main-sequence stars, both at the convective core boundary and in the envelope, has significant effects on the nucleosynthetic wind yields. Our evolutionary models beyond the main sequence diverge in yields from models based on rotational mixing, having longer helium burning lifetimes and lighter helium-depleted cores. We find that the asteroseismic ranges of internal mixing calibrated from core hydrogen burning stars lead to similar wind yields as those resulting from the theory of rotational mixing. Adopting the seismic mixing levels beyond the main sequence, we find earlier transitions to radiative carbon burning compared to models based on rotational mixing. This influences the compactness and the occurrence of shell-mergers, which may affect the supernova properties and explosive nucleosynthesis.