Sophie Abrahams (York)
Nucleosynthesis in accreting neutron star common envelopes
In massive-star binary systems, upon reaching later stages of stellar evolution one star can expand as a giant and envelop its companion. If the star enveloped is a neutron star, matter will rapidly accrete onto the neutron star. Accretion onto common-envelope-phase neutron stars can result in ejected matter that has undergone burning near the neutron star’s surface [1]. We study the nucleosynthesis yields of this ejected material using PRISM (Portable Routines for Integrated nucleoSynthesis Modeling), a program built for time-dependent composition tracking of nucleosynthesis in an astrophysical environment.
Collaborators have built on work done by Keegans et al. (2019), altering input trajectories in order to account for angular momentum of the accretion disk. We present nucleosynthetic results for running these trajectories in PRISM, with a focus on overproduction of low mass p-nuclides. We also present plans for future work, which will involve studying turbulence and mixing in accreting neutron star common envelopes in order to better model nucleosynthetic yields.
[1] Keegans J, Fryer CL, Jones SW, Côté B, Belczynski K, Herwig F, Pignatari M, Laird AM, Diget CA. Nucleosynthetic yields from neutron stars accreting in binary common envelopes. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 2019 May;485(1):620-39.