Related papers: The importance of binary stars
Only a handful of binary central stars of planetary nebulae (PNe) are known today, due to the difficulty of detecting their companions. Preliminary results from radial velocity surveys, however, seem to indicate that binarity plays a…
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…
Stellar astrophysicists are increasingly taking into account the effects of orbiting companions on stellar evolution. New discoveries, many thanks to systematic time-domain surveys, have underlined the role of binary star interactions in a…
Knowledge of the binary population in stellar groupings provides important information about the outcome of the star forming process in different environments. Binarity is also a key ingredient in stellar population studies and is a…
Most main sequence stars, unlike our Sun, belong to multiple systems with two or more stars. How and when these multiples come together and become bound is uncertain, since the earliest stages of star formation are difficult to resolve. We…
Roughly half of Solar-type planet hosts have stellar companions, so understanding how these binary companions affect the formation and evolution of planets is an important component to understanding planetary systems overall. Measuring the…
With the advent of large-collecting-area instruments, the number of objects that can be reached by optical long-baseline interferometry is steadily increasing. We present here a few results on massive binary stars, showing the interest of…
Binary interactions are commonplace among massive stars, giving rise observed phenomena such as X-ray binaries, stripped stars & supernovae, and gravitational-wave sources. The multiplicity properties of massive stars thus represent a…
The overall frequency and other statistical properties of binary systems suggest that star formation is intrinsically a complex and chaotic process, and that most binaries and single stars actually originate from the decay of multiple…
Planets are observed to orbit the component star(s) of stellar binary systems on so-called circumprimary or circumsecondary orbits, as well as around the entire binary system on so-called circumbinary orbits. Depending on the orbital…
Astronomers have discovered that both planets and binaries are abundant throughout the Galaxy. In combination, we know of over 100 planets in binary and higher-order multi-star systems, in both circumbinary and circumstellar configurations.…
Most stars with birth masses larger than that of our Sun belong to binary or higher order multiple systems. Similarly, most stars have stellar winds. Radiation pressure and multiplicity create outflows of material that remove mass from the…
Understanding the galaxy in which we live is one of the great intellectual challenges facing modern science. With the advent of high quality observational data, the chemical evolution modeling of our galaxy has been the subject of numerous…
Massive stars are essential to understand a variety of branches of astronomy including galaxy and star cluster evolution, nucleosynthesis and supernovae, pulsars and black holes. It has become evident that massive star evolution is very…
It is now clear that a binary evolutionary pathway is responsible for a significant fraction of all planetary nebulae, with some authors even going so far as to claim that binarity may be a near requirement for the formation of an…
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…
Nearly every star known to host planets will become a white dwarf, and nearly 100 planet-hosts are now known to be accompanied by binary stellar companions. Here, we determine how a binary companion triggers instability in otherwise…
It is now clear that a binary formation pathway is responsible for a significant fraction of planetary nebulae, and this increased sample of known binaries means that we are now in a position to begin to constrain their influence on the…
Close binary central stars of planetary nebulae are key in constraining the poorly-understood common-envelope phase of evolution, which in turn is critical in understanding the formation of a wide-range of astrophysical phenomena (including…
Binary stars and their interactions shape the formation of compact binaries, supernovae, and gravitational wave sources. The efficiency of mass transfer - the fraction of mass retained by the accretor during binary interaction - is a…