摘要:Many disc-type post-asymptotic giant branch (post-AGB) stars are chemically peculiar, showing underabundances of refractory elements in their photospheres that correlate with condensation temperature. The aim of this paper is to investigate how accretion from a circumbinary disc can cause this phenomenon of depletion and how this impacts the evolution of post-AGB stars. We used theMESAcode to evolve stars in the post-AGB phase, while including accretion of metal-poor gas. We compared the models to a sample of 58 observed disc-type post-AGB stars with chemical abundance data. For each of these stars, we estimated the luminosity and the mass using theGaiadistance. We modelled the accretion rate onto the binary from a viscously evolving disc for a range of initial accretion rates and disc masses. We find that large initial accretion rates (≳3 × 10−7 M⊙yr−1) and large initial disc masses (∼10−2 M⊙) are needed to reproduce the observed depleted post-AGB stars. Based on these high accretion rates, the evolution timescale of post-AGB stars can be significantly extended by a factor between two and five. We distinguish depletion patterns that are unsaturated (plateau profile) from those that are saturated, and we expect that post-red giant branch (post-RGB) stars are much more likely to show an unsaturated abundance pattern compared to post-AGB stars. Finally, because of the slower evolution of the low-mass post-RGB stars, we find that these systems can become depleted at lower effective temperatures (<5000 K). We conclude that accretion from a circumbinary disc successfully accounts for the chemical peculiarity of post-AGB stars.
关键词:enstars: AGB and post-AGBcircumstellar matterstars: chemically peculiarbinaries: spectroscopic