2004/10/28 by Thomas Rauch, Rauch, Thomas, Elke Reiff +9
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0410698
3 pages, 1 figure, proceedings "Astrophysics in the Far Ultraviolet", Aug 2004, Victoria, Canada
arxiv created 2004/10/28 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
95% of all stars end their lives as white dwarfs. About 20% of the hot post-AGB stars are hydrogen deficient. Most of these are the result of a late helium-shell flash, but the evolutionary status of a fraction of about 10-20% of the hottest hydrogen-deficient stars, namely four O(He) stars, is as yet unexplained. They could be the long-searched hot successors of RCrB stars, which have not been identified up to now. If this turns out to be true, then a third post-AGB evolutionary sequence is revealed, which is probably the result of a double degenerate merging process. More generally, understanding details of merging double degenerate stars is of interest in the context of SN Ia events and hence cosmology.