Speaker
Description
Massive stars are fundamental drivers of cosmic evolution, shaping the interstellar medium, enriching galaxies with heavy elements, and producing compact remnants. A large fraction reside in binary or higher-order multiple systems, with most undergoing interaction during their lifetimes, profoundly altering their evolution and final outcomes. Understanding the physics of binary interaction is therefore essential to interpreting massive-star populations and their feedback properties. Classical OBe stars, rapidly rotating O- and B-type stars with emission-line spectra, have been proposed to be binary-interaction products. If so, they would serve as key probes of past mass transfer, providing crucial constraints on binary interaction physics. Yet, large-scale observational multiplicity studies of OBe stars are scarce.
The Binarity at LOw Metallicity (BLOeM) survey addresses this gap by providing homogeneous multi-epoch spectroscopy of a large sample of massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, including approximately 100 OBe stars. With 25 radial-velocity epochs per star, we are able to detect companions across a broad parameter space and derive robust orbital solutions. I will present the measured orbits of the detected systems, assess the probable nature of their companions, and quantify observational biases to infer intrinsic multiplicity properties. By comparing the multiplicity statistics of OBe stars to their non-emission counterparts within BLOeM, as well as to Galactic samples, we probe whether OBe stars exhibit signatures expected for post-interaction systems.
| Talk category | NOVA Network 2 |
|---|---|
| Second preference | Plenary |
| PhD relevance | 1st |
