New Clues to the Evolution of Dwarf Carbon Stars From Their Variability and X-Ray Emission
Abstract
As main-sequence stars with C > O, dwarf carbon (dC) stars are never born alone but inherit carbon-enriched material from a former asymptotic giant branch (AGB) companion. In contrast to M dwarfs in post-mass-transfer binaries, C2 and/or CN molecular bands allow dCs to be identified with modest-resolution optical spectroscopy, even after the AGB remnant has cooled beyond detectability. Accretion of substantial material from the AGB stars should spin up the dCs, potentially causing a rejuvenation of activity detectable in X-rays. Indeed, a few dozen dCs have recently been found to have photometric variability with periods under a day. However, most of those are likely post-common-envelope binaries, spin-orbit locked by tidal forces, rather than solely spun-up by accretion. Here, we study the X-ray properties of a sample of the five nearest-known dCs with Chandra. Two are detected in X-rays, the only two for which we also detected short-period photometric variability. We suggest that the coronal activity detected so far in dCs is attributable to rapid rotation due to tidal locking in short binary orbits after a common-envelope phase, late in the thermally pulsing (TP) phase of the former C-AGB primary (TP-AGB).
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- February 2022
- DOI:
- 10.3847/1538-4357/ac4706
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2110.00013
- Bibcode:
- 2022ApJ...926..210R
- Keywords:
-
- 199;
- 226;
- 154;
- 254;
- 2154;
- 1823;
- Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 18 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables, Accepted to ApJ, title changed based on referee recommendation