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Abstract Binary stars are responsible for many unusual astrophysical phenomena, including some important explosive cosmic events. The stability criteria for rapid mass transfer and common-envelope evolution are fundamental to binary star evolution. They determine the mass, mass ratio, and orbital distribution of systems such as X-ray binaries and merging gravitational-wave sources. We use our adiabatic mass-loss model to systematically survey metal-poor and solar-metallicity donor thresholds for dynamical timescale mass transfer. The critical mass ratios q ad are systematically explored and the impact of metallicity and nonconservative mass transfer are studied. For metal-poor radiative-envelope donors, q ad are smaller than those for solar-metallicity stars at the same evolutionary stage. However, q ad do the opposite for convective-envelope donors. Nonconservative mass transfer significantly decreases q ad for massive donors. This is because it matters how conservative mass transfer is during the thermal timescale phase immediately preceding a delayed dynamical mass transfer. We apply our theoretical predictions to observed high-mass X-ray binaries that have overfilled their Roche lobes and find a good agreement with their mass ratios. Our results can be applied to study individual binary objects or large samples of binary objects with binary population synthesis codes.
Ge et al. (Fri,) studied this question.