Mergers and Obliquities in Stellar Triples

Understand

Many close stellar binaries are accompanied by a far-away star.

• The "eccentric Kozai-Lidov" (EKL) mechanism can cause dramatic inclination and eccentricity fluctuations, resulting in tidal tightening of inner binaries of triple stars.
• We run a large set of Monte-Carlo simulations including the secular evolution of the orbits, general relativistic precession and tides, and we determine the semimajor axis, eccentricity, inclination and spin-orbit angle distributions of the final configurations.
• We find that the efficiency of forming tight binaries (<~16 d) when taking the EKL mechanism into account is ~ 21%, and about 4% of all simulated systems ended up in a merger event.