Shocking and Mass Loss of Compact Donor Stars in Type Ia Supernovae

Abstract

Type Ia supernovae arise from thermonuclear explosions of white dwarfs accreting from a binary companion. Following the explosion, the surviving donor star leaves at roughly its orbital velocity. The discovery of the runaway helium subdwarf star US 708, and seven hypervelocity stars from Gaia data, all with spatial velocities ≳900 km s ^−1 , strongly support a scenario in which the donor is a low-mass helium star or a white dwarf. Motivated by these discoveries, we perform three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations with the Athena++ code, modeling the hydrodynamical interaction between a helium star or helium white dwarf and the supernova ejecta. We find that ≈0.01–0.02 M _⊙ of donor material is stripped, and explain the location of the stripped material within the expanding supernova ejecta. We continue the postexplosion evolution of the shocked donor stars with the MESA code. As a result of entropy deposition, they remain luminous and expanded for ≈10 ^5 –10 ^6 yr. We show that the postexplosion properties of our helium white dwarf donor agree reasonably with one of the best-studied hypervelocity stars, D6-2.

Keywords

• White dwarf stars
• Type Ia supernovae
• Hypervelocity stars
• Binary stars