BN3 - NS-NS and NS-WD mergers |
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Speaker |
Margalit, Ben |
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Coauthors |
Margalit, Ben; Metzger, Brian D. |
| Talk Title |
White Dwarf – Neutron Star Mergers: from Peculiar Supernovae to Pulsar Planets |
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Abstract |
The merger of binaries consisting of a white dwarf (WD) and a neutron star (NS), though much less studied than their NS-NS/WD-WD brethren, are relatively common astrophysical events which may contribute to the transient sky. I will present recent work modeling the post-merger accretion flows on both short (~min) and long (~kyr) timescales. Nuclear burning in the early hyper-Eddington accreting flow fuses matter up the alpha-chain, heating the geometrically thick disk to a marginally bound state prone to outflows. These outflows may power a rapidly-evolving (~week-long) optical transient, broadly consistent with the class of `Ca-rich gap transients'. Finally, by modeling the long-term disk evolution, I show that a WD-NS merger provides a natural mechanism for creating planets orbiting the millisecond pulsar PSR B1257+12, providing new insight into the unusually high proper motion of the pulsar-planet system. |
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