The eccentric behaviour of windy binary stars

Abstract

Carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars, CH stars and barium stars, among other classes of chemically peculiar stars, are thought to be products of the interaction of low- and intermediate-mass binaries which occurred when the most evolved star was in the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) phase. Binary evolution models predict that if the initial orbital periods of such systems are shorter than a few thousand days, their orbits should have circularised due to tidal effects. However, observations of the progeny of AGB binaries show that many of these objects have substantial eccentricities, up to about 0.9. In this work we explore the impact of wind mass transfer on the orbits of AGB binaries by performing numerical simulations in which the AGB wind is modelled using a hydrodynamical code and the stellar dynamics is evolved using an N-body code. We find that in most models wind mass transfer contributes to the circularisation of the orbit, but on longer timescales than tidal circularisation if the eccentricity is less than about 0.4. For low initial wind velocities and pseudo-synchronisation of the donor star, we find a structure resembling wind Roche-lobe overflow near periastron. In this case, the interaction between the gas and the stars is stronger than for high initial wind velocities and the orbit shrinks while the eccentricity decreases. In one of our models wind interaction is found to pump the eccentricity on a similar timescale as tidal circularisation. Although our study is based on a small sample of models, it offers some insight into the orbital evolution of eccentric binaries interacting via winds. A larger grid of numerical models for different binary parameters is needed to test if a regime exists where hydrodynamical eccentricity pumping can effectively counteract tidal circularisation, and if this can explain the puzzling eccentricities of the descendants of AGB binaries.