Stars on the ascending helium giant branch

I. From white dwarf merger to helium giant: the evolutionary state of the rapidly rotating hot subdwarf HE 1518-0948

¹ Institut für Physik und Astronomie, Universität Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24/25, D-14476 Potsdam, Germany
² Instituto de Astrofísica de La Plata, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas Avenida Centenario (Paseo del Bosque) S/N, B1900FWA, La Plata, Argentina
³ Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Avenida Centenario (Paseo del Bosque) S/N, B1900FWA, La Plata, Argentina
⁴ Hamburger Sternwarte, University of Hamburg, Gojenbergsweg 112, D-21029 Hamburg, Germany

^★ Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Received: 4 March 2026
Accepted: 10 April 2026

Abstract

Hot subdwarf stars with masses above 0.8 M_⊙ ascend the helium giant branch after the end of core helium burning, before entering the white dwarf cooling track or exploding as type Ib/c supernovae. Such massive helium stars are typically expected to form through the stripping of an intermediate-mass star by a binary companion. Even after being stripped, the stars are expected to retain a detectable amount of hydrogen, but there is also the class of extreme helium-rich hot subdwarfs (He-sdOs), which show no traces, or only very weak traces, of hydrogen in their spectra. Several evolutionary channels have been proposed to explain their formation, but their extremely low binary fraction suggests that they are either created through single-star evolution triggered by a late hot flash in a low-mass red giant or the merger of two helium white dwarfs (WDs). Most He-sdOs are located close to the helium zero age main sequence, while a small number exhibit much lower surface gravities, indicating inflated radii. Whether these objects are evolutionarily connected to the main He-sdO population remains unclear. For this work we analysed the extreme helium-rich, low-surface-gravity sdO HE 1518–0948 (HE 1518) through a detailed spectroscopic study of optical and ultraviolet data. We measured an effective temperature of 52 000 ± 2500 K, a surface gravity log g of 4.64 ± 0.15 dex, an upper limit for the hydrogen abundance of log(n_He/n_H)  < 2.5, and an exceptionally high projected rotational velocity of 90 ± 20 km s⁻¹, significantly higher than that of most known He-sdOs. The star is found to belong kinematically to the Galactic halo, consistent with the very low metallicity derived from our abundance analysis. A comparison with evolutionary models indicates that HE 1518 is the product of a massive double helium white dwarf merger and is currently undergoing helium shell burning while ascending the helium giant branch. This makes HE 1518 one of only a few known objects located in this sparsely populated region of the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram. Such stars provide valuable laboratories for studying the evolution of massive hot subdwarfs beyond core helium burning, and their high luminosities allow them to be detected at large distances.