Related papers: A brown dwarf mass donor in an accreting binary
Mass is the fundamental parameter that governs the evolution of stars, brown dwarfs, and gas-giant planets. Thus, direct mass measurements are essential to test the evolutionary and atmospheric models that underpin studies of these objects.…
White dwarfs are the burnt out cores of Sun-like stars and are the final fate of 97% of all stars in our Galaxy. The internal structure and composition of white dwarfs are hidden by their high gravities, which causes all elements, apart…
Although white dwarfs are believed to be the end point of most stellar evolution, unlike main sequence stars, they have not yet been the subject of dedicated time-domain surveys for exoplanets. We discuss how their size and distinctive…
The census of solar neighbours is still complemented by new discoveries, mainly of very low-mass, faint dwarfs, close to or within the substellar domain. These discoveries contribute to a better understanding of the field population; its…
We study the evolution of a low mass x-ray binary coupling a binary stellar evolution code with a general relativistic code that describes the behavior of the neutron star. We assume the neutron star to be low--magnetized (B~10^8 G). In the…
Stellar fundamental properties (masses, radii, effective temperatures) can be extracted from observations of eclipsing binary systems with remarkable precision, often better than 2%. Such precise measurements afford us the opportunity to…
It is not known whether brown dwarfs (stellar-like objects with masses less than the hydrogen-burning limit, 0.075 Msun) are formed in the same way as solar-type stars or by some other process. Here we report the clear-cut identification of…
Mass transfer in close binaries is often non-conservative and the modeling of this kind of mass transfer is mathematically challenging as in this case due to the loss of mass as well as angular momentum the governing system gets complicated…
In this paper we consider the population of eccentric binaries with a neutron star and a white dwarf that has been revealed in our galaxy in recent years through binary pulsar observations. We apply our statistical analysis method (Kim,…
The maximum mass of a neutron star (NS) is poorly defined. Theoretical attempts to define this mass have thus far been unsuccessful. Observational results currently provide the only means of narrowing this mass range down. Eclipsing X-ray…
Observations of accretion disks around young brown dwarfs have led to the speculation that they may form planetary systems similar to normal stars. While there have been several detections of planetary-mass objects around brown dwarfs…
Short period double degenerates (DDs) are close white dwarf - white dwarf binary stars which are the result of the evolution of interacting binary stars. We present the first definitive measurements of the mass ratio for two DDs, WD0136+768…
The distinguishing feature of the evolution of close binary stars is the role played by the mass exchange between the component stars. Whether the mass transfer is dynamically stable is one of the essential questions in binary evolution. In…
Microlensing is sensitive to binary, brown dwarf, and planetary companions to normal stars in the Galactic bulge with separations between about 1-10 AU. The accurate, densely-sampled photometry of microlensing events needed to detect…
We present Chandra and Swift X-ray observations of four extremely low-mass (ELM) white dwarfs with massive companions. We place stringent limits on X-ray emission from all four systems, indicating that neutron star companions are extremely…
Polluted white dwarfs are generally accreting terrestrial-like material that may originate from a debris belt like the asteroid belt in the solar system. The fraction of white dwarfs that are polluted drops off significantly for white…
The white dwarf mass distribution has been studied primarily at two extremes: objects that presumably evolved as single stars and members of close binaries that likely underwent substantial interaction. This work considers the intermediate…
While it is well known that mass transfer in binaries can pollute the surfaces of the accretors, it is still unclear whether this mechanism can reproduce the observed chemical inhomogeneities in globular clusters. We study the surface…
GJ 229B, the first type-T brown dwarf to be discovered, has presented a tension between comparisons with evolutionary models and the larger-than-expected mass and radius values derived from spectroscopic and astrometric observations. We…
Fast spinning neutron stars, recycled in low mass binaries, may have accreted a substantial amount of mass. The available relativistic measurements of neutron star masses, all clustering around 1.4 M_sun, however refer mostly to slowly…