Speaker
Description
Massive stars are chemical factories, they are progenitors of supernovae, neutron stars and black holes, and they play a crucial role in the formation and evolution of their local environment as well as their entire host galaxies. Given their prevalence in close binary systems, at the end of their lives they may produce double-compact objects, which are potential gravitational-wave sources. During their life cycles, interactions with their companion stars drastically alter the evolution of both stars. Yet, the complex interaction physics as well as the outcome of the interactions remain poorly understood.
To address these open questions, especially at low metallicity, where most of the gravitational-wave sources originate, we recently initiated the large-scale spectroscopy survey "BLOeM: Binarity at Low Metallicity", which collects multi-epoch spectroscopy of a sample of ~1000 massive stars in our neighboring Galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC).
In my talk, I will present new BLOeM results about the multiplicity properties of massive stars in the SMC. I will discuss the observed binary fractions across the upper Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, from O- and B-type dwarfs towards B- and late-type supergiants, and provide the spectroscopic binary properties of a large sample of rapidly rotating OeBe stars for the first time. I will discuss trends in the binary fractions as a function of evolutionary status and masses of the stars, and compare our findings to state-of-the-art binary predictions. This will provide crucial new insights in the binary-interaction physics that are at play.
| Talk category | NOVA Network 2 |
|---|---|
| Preference for a talk or poster | Talk |
