Binary Stars Take What They Get: Evidence for Efficient Mass Transfer from Stripped Stars with Rapidly Rotating Companions

Abstract

Binary stars and their interactions shape the formation of compact binaries, supernovae, and gravitational-wave sources. The efficiency of mass transfer—the fraction of mass retained by the accretor during binary interaction—is a critical parameter that significantly impacts the final fates of these systems. However, this parameter is observationally poorly constrained, due to the scarcity of well-characterized post-mass-transfer binaries. Be+sdOB binaries, consisting of a rapidly rotating Be star and a stripped hot subdwarf companion, are particularly valuable for studying mass transfer, since they represent clear examples of past binary interaction. Recently, a significantly expanded observational sample of 16 Be+sdOB binaries with well-constrained masses was obtained through combined spectroscopic and interferometric observations. In this work, we compile and analyze this sample, to provide robust constraints on the mass-transfer efficiency in binaries that underwent stable mass transfer during the donor’s hydrogen-shell-burning phase. Our analysis reveals that the mass transfer was predominantly conservative: half of the systems require mass-transfer efficiencies above 50%. This challenges the commonly adopted assumptions of highly nonconservative mass transfer in binary evolution modeling. Our findings are inconsistent with models that account for spinup and limit accretion due to a centrifugal barrier. We also find tension with a commonly used mass-transfer model in rapid population synthesis that limits accretion based on the thermal timescale of the accretor. These results have strong implications for almost all products of binary evolution, including a variety of supernovae, white dwarfs, blue stragglers, runaway stars, X-ray binaries, and gravitational-wave sources.