A New Route to Massive Hot Subdwarfs: Common Envelope Ejection from Asymptotic Giant Branch Stars

The hot subdwarf O/B stars (sdO/Bs) are known as extreme horizontal branch stars, which is of great importance in stellar evolution theory. The sdO/Bs are generally thought to have a helium-burning core and a thin hydrogen envelope ( M env < 0.02 M ⊙ ). In the canonical binary evolution scenario, sdO/Bs are considered to be the stripped cores of red giants. However, such a scenario cannot explain the recently discovered sdO/B binary SMSS J1920, where the strong Ca H and K lines in the spectrum are found. It suggests that this binary likely originated from the recent ejection of the common envelope (CE). In this work, we propose a new formation channel of massive sdO/Bs, namely, sdO/Bs produced from a CE ejection process with an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star (hereafter the AGB CE channel). We constructed the evolutionary model of sdO/Bs and successfully explained most of the important observed parameters of the sdO/B star in SMSS J1920, including the evolutionary age, sdO/B mass, effective temperature, surface gravity, and surface helium abundance. The minimum sdO/B mass produced from the AGB CE channel is about 0.48 M ⊙ . The evolutionary tracks in the log T eff – log g plane may explain a fraction of the observational samples with high log T eff and low log g . Considering the wind mass loss of sdO/Bs, the model could produce helium-rich hot subdwarfs with log ( n He / n H ) ≳ − 1 .