The Q Branch Cooling Anomaly Can Be Explained by Mergers of White Dwarfs and Subgiant Stars
Ken J. Shen, Simon Blouin, Katelyn Breivik
Abstract
Abstract Gaia's exquisite parallax measurements allowed for the discovery and characterization of the Q branch in the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, where massive C/O white dwarfs (WDs) pause their dimming due to energy released during crystallization. Interestingly, the fraction of old stars on the Q branch is significantly higher than in the population of WDs that will become Q branch stars or that were Q branch stars in the past. From this, Cheng et al. inferred that ∼6% of WDs passing through the Q branch experience a much longer cooling delay than that of standard crystallizing WDs. Previous attempts to explain this cooling anomaly have invoked mechanisms involving supersolar initial metallicities. In this paper, we describe a novel scenario in which a standard composition WD merges with a subgiant star. The evolution of the resulting merger remnant leads to the creation of a large amount of 26 Mg, which, along with the existing 22 Ne, undergoes a distillation process that can release enough energy to explain the Q branch cooling problem without the need for atypical initial abundances. The anomalously high number of old stars on the Q branch may thus be evidence that mass transfer from subgiants to WDs leads to unstable mergers.