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On the Formation of Double White Dwarfs through Stable Mass Transfer and a Common Envelope by Woods, T. E.; Ivanova, N.; van der Sluys, M.; Chaichenets, S. is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

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Although several dozen double white dwarfs (DWDs) have been observed, for many the exact nature of the evolutionary channel(s) by which they form remains uncertain. The canonical explanation calls for the progenitor binary system to undergo two subsequent mass-transfer events, both of which are unstable and lead to a common envelope (CE). However, it has been shown that if both CE events obey the standard alpha-prescription (parametrizing energy loss), it is not possible to reproduce all of the observed systems. The gamma-prescription was proposed as an alternative to this description, instead parametrizing the fraction of angular momentum carried away in dynamical-timescale mass loss. In this paper, we analyze simultaneous energy and angular-momentum conservation, and show that the gamma-prescription cannot adequately describe a CE event for an arbitrary binary, nor can the first phase of mass loss always be understood in general as a dynamical-timescale event. We consider in detail the first episode of mass transfer in binary systems with initially low companion masses, with a primary mass in the range 1.0--1.3 solar masses and an initial mass ratio between the secondary and prim

Author

Woods, T. E.; Ivanova, N.; van der Sluys, M.; Chaichenets, S.

Published

2011

Language

EN