Related papers: Ultraviolet studies of interacting binaries
Despite the prevalence of jets in accreting systems and their impact on the surrounding medium, the fundamental physics of how they are launched and collimated is not fully understood. Radio observations of local compact objects, including…
The preponderance of binary systems in all known stellar populations makes them exciting dynamical agents for research on topics as varied as star formation, star-cluster dynamics and the interiors of young and old stars. Today we know that…
The common envelope interaction is responsible for evolved close binaries. Among them are a minority of central stars of planetary nebula (PN). Recent observational results, however, point to most PN actually being in binary systems. We…
We review the dramatic progress in the simulations of compact objects and compact-object binaries that has taken place in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This includes simulations of the inspirals and violent mergers of…
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…
Among the many recommendations of the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020, we found that a priority area of research is to pave the pathways towards finding and characterizing habitable worlds. In this context, we aim to…
A small group of X-ray binaries currently provides the best evidence for the existence of stellar-mass black holes. These objects are interacting binary systems where the X-rays arise from accretion of material onto a compact object (i.e.…
Even though Type Ia supernovae (SNIa) play an important role in many fields in astronomy, the nature of the progenitors of SNIa remain a mystery. One of the classical evolutionary pathways towards a SNIa explosion is the single degenerate…
Binary and multiple stellar systems are numerous in our solar neighborhood with 80 per cent of the solar-type stars being members of systems with high order multiplicity. The Contact Binaries Towards Merging (CoBiToM) Project is a programme…
Almost every known planet host will evolve into a white dwarf, and the surviving planetary material will continue to orbit this stellar remnant. Asteroids perturbed onto star-grazing orbits will become disrupted, forming an accretion disk…
The role of planetary nebulae as probes for the galactic chemical evolution is reviewed. Their abundances throughout the Galaxy are discussed for key elements, in particular oxygen and other alpha elements. The abundance distribution…
When the primary star in a close binary system evolves into a giant and engulfs its companion, its core and the companion temporarily orbit each other inside a common envelope. Drag forces transfer orbital energy and angular momentum to the…
The majority of the ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) in external galaxies are believed to be accreting black holes in binary systems; some of the black holes could be as massive as $\sim 100-1000 \ms$. We have performed evolution…
Some of the theoretical challenges posed by the general relativistic description of binary systems of compact objects (neutron stars or black holes) are reviewed. We recall the various ways one can use the theory of the motion, and of the…
Binary neutron stars have been observed as millisecond pulsars, gravitational-wave sources, and as the progenitors of short gamma-ray bursts and kilonovae. Massive stellar binaries that evolve into merging double neutron stars are believed…
Observations show that the 12.4 d binary system descending from the recent supernova SN 2022jli closely fits hypotheses of how low-mass X-ray binaries form, but requires an apparently super-Eddington accretion luminosity from the accreting…
The dynamic evolution of binary systems of supermassive black holes (SMBH) may be a key factor affecting a large fraction of the observed properties of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and galaxy evolution. Different classes of AGN can be…
Nascent binaries (NBs) are binary systems with very low mass ratios, less than ~0.2, in which the more massive component is an O- or B-type main-sequence star, while the secondary is a star contracting onto the main sequence. NBs are of…
The masses of compact objects like white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes are fundamental to astrophysics, but very difficult to measure. We present the results of an analysis of subluminous B (sdB) stars in close binary systems with…
In this paper, the first of a series, we study the stellar dynamical and evolutionary processes leading to the formation of compact binaries containing white dwarfs in dense globular clusters. We examine the processes leading to the…