Contributor info: Prof. Simon Portegies Zwart

Fedde Fagginger Auer, Simon Portegies Zwart

SciPost Astro. 2, 002 (2022) · published 1 April 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

A planet hardly ever survives the supernova of the host star in a bound orbit, because mass loss in the supernova and the natal kick imparted to the newly formed compact object cause the planet to be ejected. A planet in orbit around a binary has a considerably higher probability to survive the supernova explosion of one of the inner binary stars. In those cases, the planet most likely remains bound to the companion of the exploding star, whereas the compact object is ejected. We estimate this to happen to $\sim 1/33$ the circum-binary planetary systems. These planetary orbits tend to be highly eccentric ($e \ {\raise-.5ex\hbox{$\buildrel>\over\sim$}}\ 0.9$), and $\sim 20$\,\% of these planets have retrograde orbits compared to their former binary. The probability that the planet as well as the binary (now with a compact object) remains bound is about ten times smaller ($\sim 3\cdot 10^{-3}$). We then expect the Milky way Galaxy to host $\ {\raise-.5ex\hbox{$\buildrel<\over\sim$}}\ 10$ x-ray binaries that are still orbited by a planet, and $\ {\raise-.5ex\hbox{$\buildrel<\over\sim$}}\ 150$ planets that survived in orbit around the compact object's companion. These numbers should be convolved with the fraction of massive binaries that is orbited by a planet.

Jeroen Bédorf, Simon Portegies Zwart

SciPost Astro. 1, 001 (2020) · published 14 May 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We present the smoothed-particle hydrodynamics simulation code, Bonsai-SPH, which is a continuation of our previously developed gravity-only hierarchical $N$-body code (called Bonsai). The code is optimized for Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) accelerators which enables researchers to take advantage of these powerful computational resources. Bonsa-SPH produces simulation results comparable with state-of-the-art, CPU based, codes, but using an order of magnitude less computation time. The code is freely available online and the details are described in this work.