Astronomy & Astrophysics
Binary evolution at the extremes of mass-transfer efficiency: Contact, mergers, and population signatures
Binary star evolution remains inherently uncertain, and several physical processes are still not well understood. These open questions in binary physics come in addition to major uncertainties in single-star evolution, such as angular momentum transport and interior mixing. For example, the efficiency of mass transfer -- which is the fraction of transferred mass that is actually accreted -- is still one of the main uncertainties in binary evolution. In this work, we present a new grid of 1D binary evolution models …