Af. Lanza et M. Rodono, The residual orbital eccentricity in close binaries - An application to millisecond binary pulsars, ASTRON ASTR, 376(1), 2001, pp. 165-174
Density fluctuations in convective stars produce small variations of their
outer gravitational field that give rise to a very small, though finite, or
bital eccentricity in close binaries with convective components. We revisit
the theory for such an effect, originally presented by Phinney (1992), and
propose a new approach to compute the fluctuations of the outer gravitatio
nal field based on Chandrasekhar's virial theorem. It is applied to compute
the eccentricities of binaries with a millisecond pulsar component in the
framework of a simplified model of their evolution. The comparison with the
observations allows us to test the models proposed for the formation of su
ch systems, giving support to the evolutionary scenarios that connect them
with low-mass X-ray binaries, and to provide a new test for turbulent conve
ction models of giant stars.