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Merged white dwarfs and nucleosynthesis

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Abstract

Orbital decay mechanisms argue that double white dwarf mergers are inevitable, but extremely rare. Whilst some mergers result in explosions, the survivors re-ignite helium and burn brightly for tens of thousands or millions of years. Candidate survivors include extreme helium stars, R CrB variables and various classes of helium-rich subluminous star. Nuclear waste on the survivors’ surfaces provides evidence of the stars’ nuclear history prior to and their nucleosynthesis during the merger. Extensive and deep spectroscopic surveys offer rich prospects for future discoveries.

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Notes

  1. Recent work suggests DY Cen should not be included and is probably a late shell-flash post-AGB star (Jeffery et al. 2020).

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Acknowledgements

The lead author is indebted to generations of collaborators on the topic of this paper. Particular thanks are due to Amanda Karakas and Hideyuki Saio, who cowrote Jeffery et al. (2011), Shenghua Yu, who did the population synthesis, Kameswara Rao, Gajendra Pandey and David Lambert, who had kept him grounded in observations, and Dick Carson, Phil Hill, Kurt Hunger, Tony Lynas-Gray, John Drilling and Uli Heber, who set him on this fantastic journey of discovery. He is indebted to the organizers of ‘150 Years of the Periodic Table’ for their invitation and hospitality in Bengaluru, and to the organizers of the Tucson workshop on ‘Stellar Remnants’ in 1984 at which he first encountered Webbink’s merger model for RCB stars (Webbink 1984).

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  1. Armagh Observatory and Planetarium, College Hill, Armagh, BT61 9DG, UK

    C. Simon Jeffery

  2. Department of Astronomy, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, People’s Republic of China

    X. Zhang

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  1. C. Simon Jeffery
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Correspondence to C. Simon Jeffery.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection: Chemical Elements in the Universe: Origin and Evolution.

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Jeffery, C.S., Zhang, X. Merged white dwarfs and nucleosynthesis. J Astrophys Astron 41, 48 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12036-020-09669-0

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