Project description
Exploring the stripped stars’ role in binary star evolution
One-third of massive stars lose their hydrogen envelopes through binary interactions, revealing helium cores. This is important for hydrogen-poor supernovae and cosmic reionisation, with recent observations confirming their existence. Future advancements will rely on new space missions. The ERC-funded 2Sstars project aims to connect theory and observation by investigating the role of stripped stars in binary star evolution and their impact on astrophysics. It will measure stellar winds, mass-transfer efficiency, and X-ray emissions in stripped-star binaries. The project will explore magnetism and rotation in stellar interiors and the origin of He II emission in distant galaxies. It will integrate observations and theoretical models and utilise advanced simulations of binary evolution and hot-star atmospheres to generate new insights.
Objective
A third of all massive stars are predicted to lose their hydrogen-rich envelopes through interaction with a binary companion star, leaving the helium core exposed. These stripped stars are thought to be the main progenitors of hydrogen-poor core collapse supernovae, to constitute two necessary steps in the formation of merging neutron stars, and to provide so copious amounts of hard ionizing radiation that they contributed to cosmic reionization. Despite their importance, it took over half a century until we last year confirmed their predicted existence with observations. This means that theoretical models that previously had few to no observational benchmarks now face reality.
2SStars is designed to challenge theory with observation, while adressing the questions (1) What is the role of stripped stars in binary star evolution? and (2) How can stripped stars be used to understand different parts of astrophysics? We will study the stripped star binaries in detail to obtain measures for example for stellar winds, mass transfer efficiency and X-ray emission. We will also venture beyond binary evolution and use stripped stars as laboratories to investigate both how magnetism and rotation operate in stellar interiors and what the source of the enigmatic He II emission observed in galaxies across redshifts is. To fully exploit the new discovery, 2SStars is constructed as a symbiosis of observations and theory, for which we will use and develop modern codes of binary stellar evolution, hot star atmospheres, nebular spectra, and stellar populations.
With upcoming space missions in both the ultraviolet (UVEX) and milli-Hz gravitational wave regime (LISA), and new survey telescopes (VRO/LSST, WFIRST, 4MOST) and ongoing gravitational wave detections (LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA), a large fraction of the future science hinges on our understanding of binary evolution. 2SStars will provide the long-needed constraints and new theoretical models by making use of our newest type of star.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences chemical sciences inorganic chemistry noble gases
- natural sciences physical sciences astronomy observational astronomy gravitational waves
- natural sciences physical sciences astronomy astrophysics
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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3400 Klosterneuburg
Austria
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