Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Dominic BowmanORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2025. At high metallicity, a majority of massive stars have at least one close stellar companion. The evolution of such binaries is subject to strong interaction processes, which heavily impact the characteristics of their life-ending supernova and compact remnants. For the low-metallicity environments of high-redshift galaxies, constraints on the multiplicity properties of massive stars over the separation range leading to binary interaction are crucially missing. Here we show that the presence of massive stars in close binaries is ubiquitous, even at low metallicity. Using the Very Large Telescope, we obtained multi-epoch radial velocity measurements of a representative sample of 139 massive O-type stars across the Small Magellanic Cloud, which has a metal content of about one-fifth of the solar value. We find that 45% of them show radial velocity variations that demonstrate that they are members of close binary systems, and predominantly have orbital periods shorter than 1 year. Correcting for observational biases indicates that at least 70−6+11% of the O stars in our sample are in close binaries, and that at least 68−8+7% of all O stars interact with a companion star during their lifetime. We found no evidence supporting a statistically significant trend of the multiplicity properties with metallicity. Our results indicate that multiplicity and binary interactions govern the evolution of massive stars and determine their cosmic feedback and explosive fates.
Author(s): Sana H, Shenar T, Bodensteiner J, Britavskiy N, Langer N, Lennon DJ, Mahy L, Mandel I, de Mink SE, Patrick LR, Villasenor JI, Dirickx M, Abdul-Masih M, Almeida LA, Backs F, Berlanas SR, Bernini-Peron M, Bowman DM, Bronner VA, Crowther PA, Deshmukh K, Evans CJ, Fabry M, Gieles M, Gilkis A, Gonzalez-Tora G, Grafener G, Gotberg Y, Hawcroft C, Henault-Brunet V, Herrero A, Holgado G, Izzard RG, de Koter A, Janssens S, Johnston C, Josiek J, Justham S, Kalari VM, Klencki J, Kubat J, Kubatova B, Lefever RR, van Loon JT, Ludwig B, Mackey J, Maiz Apellaniz J, Maravelias G, Marchant P, Mazeh T, Menon A, Moe M, Najarro F, Oskinova LM, Ovadia R, Pauli D, Pawlak M, Ramachandran V, Renzo M, Rocha DF, Sander AAC, Schneider FRN, Schootemeijer A, Schosser EC, Schurmann C, Sen K, Shahaf S, Simon-Diaz S, van Son LAC, Stoop M, Toonen S, Tramper F, Valli R, Vigna-Gomez A, Vink JS, Wang C, Willcox R
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Nature Astronomy
Year: 2025
Volume: 9
Pages: 1337-1346
Online publication date: 02/09/2025
Acceptance date: 06/06/2025
Date deposited: 24/04/2026
ISSN (electronic): 2397-3366
Publisher: Springer Nature
URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-025-02610-x
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-025-02610-x
ePrints DOI: 10.57711/6ggw-t759
Data Access Statement: The raw data used are publicly available in the ESO archive (https://www.eso.org/archive). The normalized spectra will be made available on the ESO Phase 3 webpage (https://www.eso.org/sci/observing/phase3.html) upon completion of the programme.
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
