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arXiv · 2610.19671

Post-merger rotational evolution of magnetised single hot subdwarfs results in slow rotation due to magnetic braking

Facundo D. Moyano·Zhengwei Liu·Zhanwen Han·Xuefei Chen·Tiara Battich·Philipp Podsiadlowski
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Abstract

Single hot subdwarfs are believed to form through mergers of helium-core white dwarfs, which can lead to large-scale magnetic fields generated during the merger, and may be observable at the surface once they evolve into the stable core-helium burning phase. As a post-merger product, the orbital angular momentum of the binary system that forms it, could lead to a rapidly rotating hot subdwarf. But previous models were not able to explain the rather slow rotational velocities of observed single hot subdwarfs. Motivated by recent detections of surface magnetic fields in hot subdwarfs in the range 200 - 500 kiloGauss, we explore in this work the role of large-scale magnetic fields on their rotational evolution via rotating stellar evolution models. We find that large-scale stable magnetic fields can extract angular momentum efficiently from the star via coupling to stellar winds, producing slowly rotating single hot subdwarfs and thus providing a possible explanation to both the long rotation periods provided by asteroseismology and low spectroscopic rotational velocities. This hints magnetic braking could be an important component of the rotational properties of low-mass stellar mergers.

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Facundo D. Moyano, Zhengwei Liu, Zhanwen Han, Xuefei Chen, Tiara Battich, Philipp Podsiadlowski. 2026-10-14. Post-merger rotational evolution of magnetised single hot subdwarfs results in slow rotation due to magnetic braking. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19671

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