First Full Evolutionary Computation of the Helium Flash-induced Mixing in Population II Stars

Abstract

The core helium flash in low-mass stars with extreme mass loss occurs after the tip of the red giant branch, when the H-rich envelope is very thin. The low efficiency of the H-shell source enables the He flash-driven convective zone to penetrate H-rich layers and trigger a thermonuclear runaway, resulting in a subsequent surface enrichment with He and C. In this Letter, we present the first full computations of Population II low-mass stellar models through this phase. Models experiencing this dredge-up event are significantly hotter than their counterparts with H-rich envelopes, which makes them promising candidates for explaining the existence of stars observed beyond the canonical blue end of the horizontal branch ("blue hook stars"). Moreover, this temperature difference could explain the observed gap in Mv between extreme blue horizontal-branch and blue hook stars. A first comparison with spectroscopic observations of blue hook stars in the globular cluster ω Cen is also presented.