Numerical experiments to help understand cause and effect in massive star evolution

Abstract

The evolution of massive stars is affected by a variety of physical processes including convection, rotation, mass loss and binary interaction. Because these processes modify the internal chemical abundance profiles in multiple ways simultaneously, it can be challenging to determine which properties of the stellar interior are primarily driving the overall evolution. Building on previous work, we develop a new modelling approach called SNAPSHOT that allows us to isolate the key features of the internal abundance profile that drive the evolution of massive stars. Using our approach, we compute numerical stellar structure models in thermal equilibrium covering key phases of stellar evolution. For the main sequence, we demonstrate that models with the same mass and very similar surface properties can have different internal distributions of hydrogen and convective core masses. We discuss why massive stars expand after the main sequence and the fundamental reasons for why they become red, blue or yellow supergiants. For the post-main sequence, we demonstrate that small changes in the abundance profile can cause very large effects on the surface properties. We also discuss the effects that produce blue supergiants and the cause of blue loops. Our models show that massive stars with lower metallicity tend to be more compact due to the combined effect of lower CNO abundances in the burning regions and lower opacity in the envelope.

Accepted in MNRAS

References in corpus (20)

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Cited by in corpus (21)

• Partial-envelope stripping and nuclear-timescale mass transfer from evolved supergiants at low metallicity
• Pre-supernova evolution and final fate of stellar mergers and accretors of binary mass transfer
• Very Massive Stars and Pair-Instability Supernovae: Mass-loss Framework for low Metallicity
• Rejuvenated accretors have less bound envelopes: Impact of Roche lobe overflow on subsequent common envelope events
• Rapidly rotating Population III stellar models as a source of primary nitrogen
• Very Massive Star Models: I. Impact of Rotation and Metallicity and Comparisons with Observations
• On the impact of spectral template uncertainties in synthetic stellar populations
• Dissecting the microphysics behind the metallicity-dependence of massive stars radii
• A Panchromatic Study of Massive Stars in the Extremely Metal-Poor Local Group Dwarf Galaxy Leo A
• The giants that were born swiftly -- Implications of the top-heavy stellar initial mass function on the birth conditions of globular clusters
• The impact of convective criteria on the properties of massive stars
• On the evolutionary nature of puffed-up stripped star binaries and their occurrence in stellar populations
• The mass distribution of stars stripped in binaries: The effect of metallicity
• Binarity at LOw Metallicity (BLOeM): Multiplicity of early B-type supergiants in the Small Magellanic Cloud
• On the Anti-Correlation between Duration and Redshift in Gamma-ray Bursts
• Formation of Wind-Fed Black Hole High-mass X-ray Binaries: The Role of Roche-lobe-Overflow Post Black-Hole Formation
• Accretion in the Binary System GG Carinae and Implications for B[e] Supergiants
• Carbon from massive binary-stripped stars over cosmic time: effect of metallicity
• A constant upper luminosity limit of cool supergiant stars down to the extremely low metallicity of I Zw 18
• Accretion in massive colliding wind binaries and the effect of wind momentum ratio
• The Properties of Fast Yellow Pulsating Supergiants: FYPS Point the Way to Missing Red Supergiants