English

The i-process yields of rapidly-accreting white dwarfs from multicycle He-shell flash stellar evolution models with mixing parameterizations from 3D hydrodynamics simulations

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2019-07-24 v2

Abstract

We have modelled the multicycle evolution of rapidly-accreting CO white dwarfs (RAWDs) with stable H burning intermittent with strong He-shell flashes on their surfaces for 0.7MRAWD/M0.750.7\leq M_\mathrm{RAWD}/M_\odot\leq 0.75 and [Fe/H] ranging from 00 to 2.6-2.6. We have also computed the i-process nucleosynthesis yields for these models. The i process occurs when convection driven by the He-shell flash ingests protons from the accreted H-rich surface layer, which results in maximum neutron densities Nn,max1013N_\mathrm{n,max}\approx 10^{13}-1015 cm310^{15}\ \mathrm{cm}^{-3}. The H-ingestion rate and the convective boundary mixing (CBM) parameter ftopf_\mathrm{top} adopted in the one-dimensional nucleosynthesis and stellar evolution models are constrained through 3D hydrodynamic simulations. The mass ingestion rate and, for the first time, the scaling laws for the CBM parameter ftopf_\mathrm{top} have been determined from 3D hydrodynamic simulations. We confirm our previous result that the high-metallicity RAWDs have a low mass retention efficiency (η<10%\eta < 10\%). A new result is that RAWDs with [Fe/H]<2< -2 have η>20%\eta > 20\%, therefore their masses may reach the Chandrasekhar limit and they may eventually explode as SNeIa. This result and the good fits of the i-process yields from the metal-poor RAWDs to the observed chemical composition of the CEMP-r/s stars suggest that some of the present-day CEMP-r/s stars could be former distant members of triple systems, orbiting close binary systems with RAWDs that may have later exploded as SNeIa.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.03666,
  title  = {The i-process yields of rapidly-accreting white dwarfs from multicycle He-shell flash stellar evolution models with mixing parameterizations from 3D hydrodynamics simulations},
  author = {Pavel Denissenkov and Falk Herwig and Paul Woodward and Robert Andrassy and Marco Pignatari and Samuel Jones},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.03666},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

15 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS