Lunch talk on Jun. 24th, 2019

Accreting white dwarfs and the related objects

Speaker: Chengyuan Wu (YNAO)

Venue: Room 2317, SWIFAR Building

Time: 12:30 PM, Monday, 24th June, 2019

Abstract: 

Accreting white dwarfs is a class of white dwarfs that accretes material from their companion stars in binary systems. The mass-accreting white dwarfs play an important role in the study of stellar evolution, usually relating to some objects or astrophysical processes, such as, supernovae, cataclysmic variable, symbiotic stars, millisecond pulsars, supersoft X-ray sources, gravitational wave sources, etc. However, researches on the evolution of mass-accreting white dwarfs still remain uncertain, such as the massaccumulation and mass-loss processes, the burning conditions of accreted material and the final fates of the white dwarfs. 

We conducted a series of investigations on the evolution of mass-accreting white dwarfs. We investigated the process of double white dwarf mergers and found that the evolutionary outcomes of the white dwarfs are determined by mass-accretion rate during the merger process. We investigated the process of off-center carbon burning in helium-accreting carbon-oxygen white dwarf and found that the white dwarf can evolve to an oxygen-silicon core and then collapse to a neutron star. We investigated the process of helium-novae outbursts, and the obtained parameters can provide the initial input physics for the binary population synthesis studies.