Hot Subdwarf Stars

TL;DR

Hot subdwarf stars are evolved, helium-core burning stars that serve as important laboratories for studying binary evolution, stellar structure, and potential supernova progenitors, with recent advances enabling detailed characterization.

Contribution

This paper reviews the properties, evolution, and observational techniques related to hot subdwarf stars, highlighting new insights from Gaia, Kepler, TESS, and spectroscopic surveys.

Findings

Binary systems span a wide range of orbital periods.

Some systems are potential Type Ia supernova progenitors.

Mass and structural parameters are now measurable with high precision.

Abstract

Hot subdwarf (SD) stars are the stripped cores of red giant stars in transition to the white dwarf sequence. The B-type subdwarfs (sdB) are powered by helium fusion in the core, more evolved ones (sdO) by shell burning. Low mass SDs may evolve through this stage without any support by nuclear fusion. Because the loss of the giants' envelopes is likely caused by mass transfer in binaries, hot SDs are test beds for close-binary evolution through stable and unstable Roche lobe overflow, common envelope formation and ejection as well as mergers. Many classes of hot SDs can be identified according to surface composition, binarity, magnetism, pulsation characteristics and population membership, including members of globular clusters. Observed binaries show a wide spread of orbital periods from 20 minutes to more than 1,000 days with white dwarf or main sequence companions. The closest systems qualify as type Ia supernova progenitors and LISA detectable gravitational wave sources. High-precision light curves from Kepler and TESS combined with radial velocity curves are used to derive masses, while asteroseismology adds information on the internal structure, slow rotation, and synchronization. Gaia's parallax measurements now allow us to place the stars in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and derive stellar parameters by combining them with multi-band photometry. The stellar radius can be determined to high precision this way. Newton's law can then be used to derive masses if accurate surface gravities are available. Large-scale spectroscopic surveys will provide atmospheric parameters for large samples of stars, allowing the mass distributions for the diverse subtypes to be established. These are crucial for testing binary synthesis models and constraining poorly known parameters such as the common envelope efficiency as well as the critical threshold mass-ratio for mass transfer stability.