Carbon from massive binary-stripped stars: Effect of metallicity

¹ Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 1, 85748 Garching, Germany
² Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200D, 3001 Leuven, Belgium
³ Leuven Gravity Institute, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200D, box 2415, 3001 Leuven, Belgium
⁴ Anton Pannekoek Institute of Astronomy, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam, The Netherlands
⁵ Heidelberger Institut für Theoretische Studien, Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg 35, 69118 Heidelberg, Germany

^★ Corresponding author: jingze@mpa-garching.mpg.de

Received: 30 April 2025
Accepted: 16 October 2025

Abstract

The origin of carbon in the Universe remains uncertain. It has been suggested that at the solar metallicity, binary-stripped massive stars – stars that lost their envelope through a stable interaction with a companion – produce twice as much carbon as their single-star counterparts. However, understanding the chemical evolution of galaxies over cosmic time requires examining stellar yields across a range of metallicities. Using the stellar evolution code MESA, we computed the carbon yields from wind mass loss and supernova explosions of single and binary-stripped stars across a wide range of initial masses (10–46 M_⊙), metallicities (Z = 0.0021, 0.0047, 0.0142), and initial orbital periods (10–5000 days). We find that metallicity is the dominant factor influencing the carbon yields of massive stars, outweighing the effects of binarity and orbital parameters. Since the chemical yields from massive binary stars are highly sensitive to metallicity, we caution that yields predicted at the solar metallicity should not be directly extrapolated to lower metallicities. At subsolar metallicities (Z = 0.0021), weak stellar winds and inefficient binary stripping result in carbon yields from binary-stripped stars that closely resemble those of single stars. This suggests that binary-stripped massive stars cannot explain the presence of carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars or the carbon enrichment observed in high-redshift galaxies as probed by the James Webb Space Telescope. Our findings only cover the stripped stars in massive binaries. The impact of other paths of binary star evolution, in particular stellar mergers and accretors, remains largely unexplored; future study will be necessary for a full understanding of the role of massive binaries in nucleosynthesis.