The Core Mass Growth and Stellar Lifetime of Thermally Pulsing Asymptotic Giant Branch Stars

Abstract

We establish new constraints on the intermediate-mass range of the initial-final mass relation by studying white dwarfs in four young star clusters, and apply the results to study the evolution of stars on the thermally pulsing asymptotic giant branch (TP-AGB). We show that the stellar core mass on the AGB grows rapidly from 10% to 30% for stars with $M_{\mathrm{initial}}$ = 1.6 to 2.0 $M_{\odot }$. At larger masses, the core-mass growth decreases steadily to $\sim$10% at $M_{\mathrm{initial}}$ = 3.4 $M_{\odot }$. These observations are in excellent agreement with predictions from the latest TP-AGB evolutionary models in Marigo et al. (2013). We also compare to models with varying efficiencies of the third dredge-up and mass loss, and demonstrate that the process governing the growth of the core is largely the stellar wind, while the third dredge-up plays a secondary, but non-negligible role. Based on the new white dwarf measurements, we perform an exploratory calibration of the most popular mass-loss prescriptions in the literature. Finally, we estimate the lifetime and the integrated luminosity of stars on the TP-AGB to peak at $t$ $\sim$ 3 Myr and $E$ = 1.2 $\times$ 10${}^{10}$ $L_{\odot }$ yr for $M_{\mathrm{initial}}$ $\sim$ 2 $M_{\odot }$ ($t$ $\sim$ 2 Myr for luminosities brighter than the RGB tip at $\log (L/L_{\odot })$ $>$ 3.4), decreasing to $t$ = 0.4 Myr and $E$ = 6.1 $\times$ 10${}^9$ $L_{\odot }$ yr for stars with $M_{\mathrm{initial}}$ $\sim$ 3.5 $M_{\odot }$. The implications of these results are discussed with respect to general population synthesis studies that require correct modeling of the TP-AGB phase of stellar evolution.

14 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ

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