Three-dimensional simulations of turbulent convective mixing in ONe and CO classical nova explosions^⋆

¹ Physics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, PO Box 2008, Oak Ridge, TN 37831–6354, USA
e-mail: jordi.jose@upc.edu
² Departament de Física, EUETIB, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, c/Comte d’Urgell 187, 08036 Barcelona, Spain
³ Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya, c/Gran Capità 2–4, Ed. Nexus–201, 08034 Barcelona, Spain
⁴ Departament de Física, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, c/Esteve Terrades 5, 08860 Castelldefels, Spain
⁵ Dipartimento di Fisica “Enrico Fermi”, Università di Pisa and INFN, Sezione di Pisa, Largo B. Pontecorvo 3, 56127 Pisa, Italy

Received: 13 April 2016
Accepted: 28 June 2016

Abstract

Classical novae are thermonuclear explosions that take place in the envelopes of accreting white dwarfs in binary systems. The material piles up under degenerate conditions, driving a thermonuclear runaway. The energy released by the suite of nuclear processes operating at the envelope heats the material up to peak temperatures of ~(1−4) × 10⁸ K. During these events, about 10^-3−10^-7 M_⊙, enriched in CNO and, sometimes, other intermediate-mass elements (e.g., Ne, Na, Mg, Al) are ejected into the interstellar medium. To account for the gross observational properties of classical novae (in particular, the high concentrations of metals spectroscopically inferred in the ejecta), models require mixing between the (solar-like) material transferred from the secondary and the outermost layers (CO- or ONe-rich) of the underlying white dwarf. Recent multidimensional simulations have demonstrated that Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities can naturally produce self-enrichment of the accreted envelope with material from the underlying white dwarf at levels that agree with observations. However, the feasibility of this mechanism has been explored in the framework of CO white dwarfs, while mixing with different substrates still needs to be properly addressed. Three-dimensional simulations of mixing at the core-envelope interface during nova outbursts have been performed with the multidimensional code FLASH, for two types of substrates: CO- and ONe-rich. We show that the presence of an ONe-rich substrate, as in “neon novae”, yields higher metallicity enhancements in the ejecta than CO-rich substrates (i.e., non-neon novae). A number of requirements and constraints for such 3D simulations (e.g., minimum resolution, size of the computational domain) are also outlined.