Research

In my research, I explore the interface between two active and exciting fields: binary physics and asteroseismology.

It has been well established for over a decade that a considerable fraction of massive stars - intermediate- and high-mass stars with roughly 1.3–8 and more than 8 times the mass of the Sun, respectively - live in multiple systems. Among these systems, binary stars are the simplest, though predicting how they evolve is anything but simple. Using 1D numerical codes (such as Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics or MESA), I predict when and how the components of binary systems transfer mass and how this affects both stars as well as the system as a whole. The subsequent evolution of both the donor and the accretor deviates significantly from that of single stars, which makes studying them so interesting and highly important. In about 20-40% of cases, mass transfer results in a merger between the binary components, leaving behind a single star with potentially peculiar properties. A large part of my work has focused on predicting which binary systems are likely to evolve toward such mergers (Henneco, Schneider & Laplace 2024) and on understanding how uncertain physical assumptions change this picture (Henneco, Basu & Schneider in prep.).

Asteroseismology - the study of stellar interiors through stellar pulsations—naturally comes into play once you realise that the products of binary evolution, such as stripped donor stars, accretors, and stellar merger products, often have peculiar interior structures even when they appear “normal” from their surfaces. With this in mind, asteroseismology becomes extremely powerful: it can help us identify binary products, allowing us to select only genuine single stars (or pre-mass-transfer components in binary or higher-order systems) when we want to test single-star structure and evolution theory, while also enabling us to characterise binary products and their progenitors. The other part of my research so far has been on “merger seismology”, which deals with the question of how we can use asteroseismology to distinguish merger products from genuine single stars. Using MESA and the stellar pulsation code GYRE, I evolved merger product models in 1D, predicted their asteroseismic properties, and compared those with predictions for genuine single stars (Henneco, Schneider, Hekker & Aerts 2024 and Henneco, Schneider, Heller, Hekker & Aerts 2025).

Feel free to contact me if you would like to know more or collaborate on a project in this largely unexplored and rapidly expanding interface between asteroseismology and binary physics.