Related papers: Thorne-\.Zytkow Objects
Binary interactions, especially mass transfer and mergers, can strongly influence the evolution of massive stars and change their final properties and the occurrence of supernovae. Here, we investigate how binary interactions affect…
Massive stars are born predominantly as members of binary (or higher multiplicity) systems, and the presence of a companion can significantly alter their life and final fate. Therefore, any observed sample of massive stars or associated…
The merger of two carbon-oxygen white dwarfs has long been theorized to lead to a massive carbon-oxygen or oxygen-neon white dwarf, accretion-induced collapse to a neutron star, or a type Ia supernova. Determining which mergers lead to a…
Hot subdwarfs are considered to be the compact helium cores of red giants, which lost almost their entire hydrogen envelope. What causes this enormous mass loss is still unclear. Binary interactions are invoked and a significant fraction of…
Stellar mergers are responsible for a large variety of astrophysical phenomena. They form blue straggler stars, give rise to spectacular transients, and produce some of the most massive stars in the Universe. Here, we focus on mergers from…
The LIGO and Virgo detectors have directly observed gravitational waves from mergers of pairs of stellar-mass black holes, along with a smaller number of mergers involving neutron stars. These observations raise the hope that compact object…
Coalescing compact binaries with neutron star or black hole components provide the most promising sources of gravitational radiation for detection by the LIGO/VIRGO/GEO/TAMA laser interferometers now under construction. This fact has…
The formation of hot subdwarf stars is still unclear. Both single-star and binary scenarios have been proposed to explain the properties of these evolved stars situated at the extreme blue end of the horizontal branch. The observational…
The origin of the 6.67 hr period X-ray source, 1E161348-5055, in the young supernova remnant RCW 103 is puzzling. We propose that it may be the descendant of a Thorne-Zytkow Object (TZO). A TZO may at its formation have a rapidly spinning…
One of the important issues regarding the final evolution of stars is the impact of binarity. A rich zoo of peculiar, evolved objects are born from the interaction between the loosely bound envelope of a giant, and the gravitational pull of…
With the first observation of a binary neutron star merger through gravitational waves and light GW170817, compact binary mergers have now taken the center stage in nuclear astrophysics. They are thought to be one of the main astrophysical…
The LIGO/Virgo gravitational--wave observatories have detected 50 BH-BH coalescences. This sample is large enough to have allowed several recent studies to draw conclusions about the branching ratios between isolated binaries versus dense…
We present the results of a systematic exploration of an alternative evolutionary scenario to form double neutron-star binaries, first proposed by Brown (1995), which does not involve a neutron star passing through a common envelope. In…
Because the majority of massive stars are born as members of close binary systems, populations of massive main-sequence stars contain stellar mergers and products of binary mass transfer. We simulate populations of massive stars accounting…
Close-orbit binaries consisting of two compact objects are a center of attention because of the detection of gravitational-radiation-induced mergers. The creation of close, compact-object binaries involves physical processes that are not…
The formation of massive stars is one of the major unsolved problems in stellar astrophysics. However, only few if any of these are found as single stars, on average massive stars have more than one companion. Many of them are born in dense…
Two neutron stars merge somewhere in the Universe approximately every 10 seconds, creating violent explosions observable in gravitational waves and across the electromagnetic spectrum. The transformative coincident gravitational-wave and…
Most galaxies have central massive black holes (BH), and merge with others during their evolution, as strongly suggested by recent observations. Consequently a black hole binary (BHB) emerges. Considering the evolution of the binary when it…
We analyze the distinguishability of populations of coalescing binary neutron stars, neutron-star black-hole binaries, and binary black holes, whose gravitational-wave signatures are expected to be observed by the advanced network of…
Mergers of black hole-neutron star (BHNS) binaries have now been observed by GW detectors with the recent announcement of GW200105 and GW200115. Such observations not only provide confirmation that these systems exist, but will also give…