The lives, deaths and afterlives of stars stripped in binary systems
Most massive stars live in binaries. Due to interactions between binary stars, the initially most massive component loses its Hydrogen-rich envelope and becomes a stripped star. At the end of their lives, these objects give rise to faint and fast transient events that can now be observed thanks to a new generation of transient surveys such as ZTF, Las Cumbres Observatory, or LSST). However, theoretical models for their progenitor structures and light-curves are still lacking.
Better understanding these systems is particularly important in our era of multi-messenger astrophysics since they are the progenitors of the most energetic explosions in the universe, supernovae and gamma-ray bursts, and naturally lead to the formation of gravitational-wave sources.
My PhD project aims at exploring the evolution of stripped stars from interacting binaries, and at understanding their explosion properties by computing their detailed stellar structures and light-curves using 1D hydrodynamic simulation codes (MESA for the binary evolution and SNEC for the Supernova explosion).