1D stellar mergers: entropy sorting and PyMMAMS

Abstract

Stellar multiple systems are the norm, not the exception, with many systems undergoing interaction phases during their lifetimes. A subset of these interactions can lead to stellar mergers, where the two components of a stellar binary system come close enough to coalesce into a single star. Accurately modeling stellar mergers requires computationally expensive 3D methods, which are not suited for exploring large parameter spaces as required e.g., by population synthesis studies. In this work, we compare two 1D prescriptions based on the concept of entropy sorting to their 3D counterparts. We employ a basic entropy sorting method ('ES'), which builds the merger remnant by sorting the progenitor stars' shells by increasing entropy, and a Python version of the 'Make Me A Massive Star' code ('PM'), which additionally applies a shock-heating prescription calibrated on SPH simulations of stellar head-on collisions. Comparing to a set of 39 more recent SPH head-on collisions different from the ones used for PM calibration, we find that PM reproduces the outcome of these mergers a lot better than ES in terms of thermal and composition structure post-merger. Both 1D methods produce remnants that are rejuvenated more strongly than expected for massive stars, indicating that increased amounts of hydrogen are being mixed into the core. In an effort to further improve PM, we introduce a scaling factor for the shock-heating. We compare 1D models with both down- and up-scaled heating to a 3D MHD $9 + 8\,\mathrm{M_\odot}$ merger of main-sequence stars. Decreasing the shock-heating improves the agreement in terms of the entropy profile, but has only a minor impact on the subsequent stellar evolution of the remnant. We find that 1D methods are able to approximate 3D stellar merger simulations well, and that shock-heating has to be considered to properly predict the post-merger structures.