TY - JOUR
T1 - Remnants of binary white dwarf mergers
AU - Raskin, Cody
AU - Scannapieco, Evan
AU - Fryer, Chris
AU - Rockefeller, Gabriel
AU - Timmes, Francis
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2015 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2012/2/10
Y1 - 2012/2/10
N2 - We carry out a comprehensive smooth particle hydrodynamics simulation survey of double-degenerate white dwarf binary mergers of varying mass combinations in order to establish correspondence between initial conditions and remnant configurations. We find that all but one of our simulation remnants share general properties such as a cold, degenerate core surrounded by a hot disk, while our least massive pair of stars forms only a hot disk. We characterize our remnant configurations by the core mass, the rotational velocity of the core, and the half-mass radius of the disk. We also find that some of our simulations with very massive constituent stars exhibit helium detonations on the surface of the primary star before complete disruption of the secondary. However, these helium detonations are insufficiently energetic to ignite carbon, and so do not lead to prompt carbon detonations.
AB - We carry out a comprehensive smooth particle hydrodynamics simulation survey of double-degenerate white dwarf binary mergers of varying mass combinations in order to establish correspondence between initial conditions and remnant configurations. We find that all but one of our simulation remnants share general properties such as a cold, degenerate core surrounded by a hot disk, while our least massive pair of stars forms only a hot disk. We characterize our remnant configurations by the core mass, the rotational velocity of the core, and the half-mass radius of the disk. We also find that some of our simulations with very massive constituent stars exhibit helium detonations on the surface of the primary star before complete disruption of the secondary. However, these helium detonations are insufficiently energetic to ignite carbon, and so do not lead to prompt carbon detonations.
KW - hydrodynamics
KW - nuclear reactions, nucleosynthesis, abundances
KW - supernovae: general
KW - white dwarfs Online-only material: color figures
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U2 - 10.1088/0004-637X/746/1/62
DO - 10.1088/0004-637X/746/1/62
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84856250248
VL - 746
JO - Astrophysical Journal
JF - Astrophysical Journal
SN - 0004-637X
IS - 1
M1 - 62
ER -