Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 493, Issue 3, Pages 4333-4341Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa549
Keywords
convection; methods: numerical; stars: black holes; stars: massive
Categories
Funding
- European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme from the European Research Council (ERC) [715063]
- Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) as part of the Vidi research program BinWaves [639.042.728]
- Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) through a top module 2 grant [614.001.501]
- National Science Foundation [NSF PHY-1748958]
- SURF Cooperative [16343]
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Gravitational-wave detections are nowprobing the black hole (BH) mass distribution, including the predicted pair-instability mass gap. These data require robust quantitative predictions, which are challenging to obtain. The most massive BH progenitors experience episodic mass ejections on time-scales shorter than the convective turnover time-scale. This invalidates the steady-state assumption on which the classic mixing length theory relies. We compare the final BH masses computed with two different versions of the stellar evolutionary code MESA: (i) using the default implementation of Paxton et al. (2018) and (ii) solving an additional equation accounting for the time-scale for convective deceleration. In the second grid, where stronger convection develops during the pulses and carries part of the energy, we find weaker pulses. This leads to lower amounts of mass being ejected and thus higher final BH masses of up to similar to 5 M-circle dot. The differences are much smaller for the progenitors that determine the maximum mass of BHs below the gap. This prediction is robust at M-BH,M- max similar or equal to 48 M-circle dot, at least within the idealized context of this study. This is an encouraging indication that current models are robust enough for comparison with the present-day gravitational-wave detections. However, the large differences between individual models emphasize the importance of improving the treatment of convection in stellar models, especially in the light of the data anticipated from the third generation of gravitational-wave detectors.
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