Deep Dredge-up in Intermediate-Mass TP-AGB Stars
Abstract
We present results of the evolution of AGB stars of 3M_sol and 5M_sol with solar metallicity calculated with the Eggleton stellar evolution code (STARS), which has a fully implicit and simultaneous method for solving for the stellar structure, convective mixing and nuclear burning. We introduce the concept of a viscous mesh in order to improve the numerical stability of the calculations. For the 5M_sol star, we evolve through 25 thermal pulses and their associated third dredge-up events. We obtain a maximum helium luminosity of 1.7x10^9 L_sol and significantly deep dredge-up after the second pulse. Strong hot-bottom burning is observed after the 5th pulse. The 3M_sol model is evolved through 20 thermal pulse events and we find third dredge-up after the 7th pulse. During the 14th pulse sufficient carbon has been brought to the surface to produce a carbon star. We find that dredge-up and the transformation into a carbon star occur at significantly smaller core masses (0.584M_sol and 0.608M_sol, respectively) than in previous calculations for 3M_sol.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0405150,
title = {Deep Dredge-up in Intermediate-Mass TP-AGB Stars},
author = {R. J. Stancliffe and C. A. Tout and O. R. Pols},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0405150},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
10 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Some figures have been degraded to save space. For a full resolution copy, see http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~rs/docs/ME247rv.ps.gz