Nuclear Burning in Accretion Flow of Helium-rich matter onto Compact Objects

Abstract

We investigate the impacts of nuclear burning on the spherically symmetric stationary accretion flow of helium-rich matter on to compact objects. We have already shown the existence of the critical accretion rates for the accretion of CO-rich matter above which the flow truncates in the supersonic region due to nuclear burning in the previous paper \citep{2022ApJ...933...29N}. Here, we show that there are also critical accretion rates for helium-rich matter. While we used empirical formulae for the energy generation rates for carbon burning and oxygen burning without solving the nuclear reaction network in our previous work, we solve a simple nuclear reaction network consisting of 13 elements from ${}^4$He to ${}^{56}$Ni to investigate influence of the energy generation from not only triple-$\alpha$ reactions but also the subsequent reactions of synthesized elements. We have also qualitatively confirmed the previous results for CO-rich matter accretion using the revised code with the nuclear reaction network and reported some new findings.

Comments: 11 pages, 12 figures. To be submitted to The Publication of Astronomical Society of Japan