MESA models show residual hydrogen envelope mass sets effective temperature on the horizontal branch, with maximum values of 0.05-0.30 solar masses to avoid later thermally pulsing AGB evolution, plus explanations for blue hook stars and puffed-up pre-HB configurations.
Are sdAs helium core stars?
1 Pith paper cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Evolved stars with a helium core can be formed by non-conservative mass exchange interaction with a companion or by strong mass loss. Their masses are smaller than 0.5 MSun. In the database of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), there are several thousand stars which were classified by the pipeline as dwarf O, B and A stars. Considering the lifetimes of these classes on the main sequence, and their distance modulus at the SDSS bright saturation, if these were common main sequence stars, there would be a considerable population of young stars very far from the galactic disk. Their spectra are dominated by Balmer lines which suggest effective temperatures around 8000-10000K. Several thousand have significant proper motions, indicative of distances smaller than 1kpc. Many show surface gravity in intermediate values between main sequence and white dwarf, 4.75 < log g < 6.5, hence they have been called sdA stars. Their physical nature and evolutionary history remains a puzzle. We propose they are not H-core main sequence stars, but helium core stars and the outcomes of binary evolution. We report the discovery of two new extremely-low mass white dwarfs among the sdAs to support this statement.
fields
astro-ph.SR 1years
2026 1verdicts
UNVERDICTED 1representative citing papers
citing papers explorer
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Shaping the horizontal branch: The role of envelope mass in the evolution of stripped core-helium-burning stars
MESA models show residual hydrogen envelope mass sets effective temperature on the horizontal branch, with maximum values of 0.05-0.30 solar masses to avoid later thermally pulsing AGB evolution, plus explanations for blue hook stars and puffed-up pre-HB configurations.