Evolution of binary seeds in collapsing protostellar gas clouds

Abstract

We perform 3D smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of gas accretion on to the seeds of binary stars to investigate their short-term evolution. Taking into account the dynamically evolving envelope with non-uniform distribution of gas density and angular momentum of accreting flow, our initial condition includes a seed binary and a surrounding gas envelope, modelling the phase of core collapse of gas cloud when the fragmentation has already occurred. We run multiple simulations with different values of initial mass ratio q0 (the ratio of secondary over primary mass) and gas temperature. For our simulation setup, we find a critical value of qc = 0.25 which distinguishes the later evolution of mass ratio q as a function of time. If q0 ≳ qc, the secondary seed grows faster and q increases monotonically towards unity. If q0 ≲ qc, on the other hand, the primary seed grows faster and q is lower than q0 at the end of the simulation. Based on our numerical results, we analytically calculate the long-term evolution of the seed binary including the growth of binary by gas accretion. We find that the seed binary with q0 ≳ qc evolves towards an equal-mass binary star and that with q0 ≲ qc evolves to a binary with an extreme value of q. Binary separation is a monotonically increasing function of time for any q0, suggesting that the binary growth by accretion does not lead to the formation of close binaries.