The Viscous Evolution of White Dwarf Merger Remnants

Understand

The merger of two white dwarfs (WDs) creates a differentially rotating remnant which is unstable to magnetohydrodynamic instabilities.

• These instabilities can lead to viscous evolution on a time-scale short compared to the thermal evolution of the remnant.
• We present multi-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of the evolution of WD merger remnants under the action of an $\alpha$-viscosity.
• We initialize our calculations using the output of eight WD merger simulations from Dan et al.