Mass-feeding of jet-launching white dwarfs in grazing and common envelope evolution

I propose a scenario that allows white dwarfs (WDs) to launch relatively powerful jets when they enter a common envelope evolution (CEE) or experience a grazing envelope evolution (GEE) with a red giant branch star (RGB) or an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star. In this, still a speculative scenario...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Noam Soker
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Maynooth Academic Publishing 2025-08-01
Series:The Open Journal of Astrophysics
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.33232/001c.143436
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:I propose a scenario that allows white dwarfs (WDs) to launch relatively powerful jets when they enter a common envelope evolution (CEE) or experience a grazing envelope evolution (GEE) with a red giant branch star (RGB) or an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star. In this, still a speculative scenario, the accretion for a time is mainly onto an accretion disk with a radius of $\simeq 1 R_\odot$ that increases in mass. The accretion disk launches the powerful two opposite jets by releasing gravitational energy, up to several times super-Eddington, as its mass increases. The jets launched by the disk remove high-entropy gas from its outskirts and the envelope that the WD inflates due to nuclear burning on its surface. The motivations to allow WDs to launch powerful jets are recent findings, from the morphologies of post-CEE planetary nebulae, that jets play a major role in the CEE and the accumulating evidence that jets power luminous red novae by jets, as their morphologies indicate. I strengthen my call to include jets in the simulation and modeling of the CEE, consider the GEE as a phase preceding the CEE in many (but not all) cases, and include jets as a major ingredient in modeling and simulating all energetic luminous red novae.
ISSN:2565-6120