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Where Has All the R-process Gone? Timescales for Gamma-Ray Burst Kilonovae to Enrich Their Host Galaxies

  • Authors: Anya E. Nugent, Alexander P. Ji, Wen-fai Fong, Hilay Shah, Freeke van de Voort

Anya E. Nugent et al 2025 The Astrophysical Journal 982 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 2.

The two scenarios we use to model the transport of r-process metals from the offset of the KNe (yellow stars) in our sample to the host-galaxy center. In Scenario 1, we assume that the thermal pressure from hot halo gas can support the metals against gravitational freefall if the gas is hot enough, and the timescale to transport the r-process will be the maximum of the freefall (tff) and cooling (tcool) timescales. In Scenario 2, the metals are transported with turbulent diffusion mechanisms within the halo gas, and the fallback timescale is the diffusion timescale (tdiff). The r-process enrichment timescale will be the faster of Scenario 1 or 2. As shown in Section 4, diffusion is more efficient at transporting the metals at small KN offsets, whereas freefall is more efficient at larger KN offsets, and cooling is only relevant for events highly offset from large halos.

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