Related papers: Formation of massive binaries
Stellar systems consisting of three or more stars are not an uncommon occurrence in the Galaxy. Nearly 50% of solar-type wide binaries with separations >1000 au are actually higher-order multiples with one component being a close binary.…
In this short communication I compare recent findings suggesting a low binary star fraction for late type stars with knowledge concerning the forms of the stellar initial and present day mass functions for masses down to the hydrogen…
Very massive stars preferentially reside in the cores of their parent clusters and form binary or multiple systems. We study the role of tight very massive binaries in the origin of the field population of very massive stars. We performed…
The formation of supermassive stars is believed to be an essential intermediate step for the formation of the massive black hole seeds that become the supermassive black holes powering the quasars observed in the early Universe. Numerical…
Binary stars are dynamical systems formed by two stars that are physically bound by the gravitational force. Binary stars are privileged laboratories, allowing one to measure the fundamental properties of stars but also potentially changing…
Massive binary stars undergo qualitatively different evolution when the two components are similar in mass ('twins'), and the abundance of twin binaries is therefore important to understanding a wide range of astrophysical phenomena. We…
Blue stragglers are thought to be formed from the merger or coalescence of two stars, but the details of their formation in clusters has been difficult to disentangle. We discuss the two main formation mechanisms for blue stragglers…
We show that massive stars and stellar clusters are formed simultaneously, the global evolution of the forming cluster is what allows the central stars to become massive. We predict that massive star forming clumps, such as those observed…
The total mass of a distant star cluster is often derived from the virial theorem, using line-of-sight velocity dispersion measurements and half-light radii, under the implicit assumption that all stars are single (although it is known that…
Massive stars, at least $\sim$ 10 times more massive than the Sun, have two key properties that make them the main drivers of evolution of star clusters, galaxies, and the Universe as a whole. On the one hand, the outer layers of massive…
A substantial fraction of stars can be found in wide binaries with projected separations between $\sim10^2$ and $10^5\,\rm AU$. In the standard lore of binary physics, these would evolve as effectively single stars that remotely orbit one…
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…
Most star complexes are in fact complexes of stars, clusters and gas clouds; term "star complexes" was introduced as general one disregarding the preferential content of a complex. Generally the high rate of star formation in a complex is…
The mass and chemical composition of a star are the primary determinants of its basic physical properties--radius, temperature, luminosity--and how those properties evolve with time. Thus, two stars born at the same time, from the same…
Young binaries within dense molecular clouds are subject to dynamical friction from ambient gas. Consequently, their orbits decay, with both the separation and period decreasing in time. A simple analytic expression is derived for this…
In dense stellar systems the frequent dynamical interactions between stars play a crucial role in the formation and evolution of compact binaries. We study these processes using a novel approach combining a state-of-the-art binary…
The formation of very wide binaries, such as the alpha Cen system with Proxima (also known as alpha Centauri C) separated from alpha Centauri (which itself is a close binary A/B) by 15000 AU, challenges current theories of star formation,…
Mergers of gas-rich galaxies lead to gravitationally driven increases in gas pressure that can trigger intense bursts of star and cluster formation. Although star formation itself is clustered, most newborn stellar aggregates are unbound…
Most stars are formed in a cluster or association, where the number density of stars can be high. This means that a large fraction of initially-single stars will undergo close encounters with other stars and/or exchange into binaries. We…
Massive stars feature highly energetic stellar winds that interact whenever two such stars are bound in a binary system. The signatures of these interactions are nowadays found over a wide range of wavelengths, including the radio domain,…