Fate of supernova progenitors in massive binary systems

Abstract

How massive stars end their lives depends on the core mass, core angular momentum, and hydrogen envelopes at death. However, these key physical facets of stellar evolution can be severely affected by binary interactions. In turn, the effectiveness of binary interactions itself varies greatly depending on the initial conditions of the binaries, making the situation much more complex. We investigate systematically how binary interactions influence core-collapse progenitors and their fates. Binary evolution simulations are performed to survey the parameter space of supernova progenitors in solar metallicity binary systems and to delineate major evolutionary paths. We first study fixed binary mass ratios ($q=M_2/M_1$ = 0.5, 0.7, and 0.9) to elucidate the impacts of initial mass and initial separation on the outcomes, treating separately Type Ibc supernova, Type II supernova, accretion induced collapse (AIC), rapidly rotating supernova (RSN), black hole formation, and gamma ray burst (GRB). We then conduct Binary Population Synthesis calculations for 12 models, varying the initial parameter distributions and binary evolution parameters, to estimate various supernova fractions. We obtain a Milky Way supernova rate $R_{\rm SN} = (1.14$--$1.57) \times10^{-2} \, {\rm yr}^{-1}$ which is consistent with observations. We find the rates of AIC, RSN, and GRB to be $\sim 1/100$ the rate of regular supernovae. Our estimated GRB rates are higher than the observed long GRB rate, but very close to the low luminosity GRB rate. Furthering binary modeling and improving the inputs one by one will enable more detailed studies of these and other transients associated with massive stars.