Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Oct 1999
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999mnras.309..245s&link_type=abstract
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 309, Issue 1, pp. 245-252.
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
5
Scientific paper
We study the chemical evolution of population I and population II secondaries in cataclysmic variables (CVs) assuming that during nova explosions a part of the high metallicity nova ejecta is intercepted by the secondary and mixed into its convective envelope. We derive analytic expressions for the chemical composition of the envelope of the secondary as a function of the chemical composition of the nova ejecta X_i,ej and the cross-section of the secondary σ. For population I CVs we find that the increase of the metallicity of the secondary is comparable to its initial metallicity only if σ is larger by an order of magnitude than the geometrical cross-section. A significant accumulation is therefore possible only in those species that are highly overabundant in the nova ejecta. Because the changes in the abundances of even those species depend strongly on the poorly known cross-section σ, the predictive power of our model is weak for population I CVs as long as σ is not well determined. In the case of population II CVs the accumulation of heavy elements by this process dominates over the initial metallicity of the secondary even for values of σ that are smaller by an order of magnitude than the geometrical cross-section. Thus, within a short time after turn-on of mass transfer, the relative metal abundances in the envelope of the secondary reflect those in the nova ejecta. This is nearly independent of the cross-section σ.
Ritter Hans
Stehle Rudolf
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