Runaway OB Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud. III. Updated Kinematics and Insights into Dynamical versus Supernova Ejections

Abstract

Abstract We use the kinematics of field OB stars to estimate the frequencies of runaway stars generated by the dynamical ejection scenario (DES), the binary supernova scenario (BSS), and the combined two-step mechanism. We update the proper motions for field OB and OBe stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) using Gaia DR3. Our sample now contains 336 stars from the Runaways and Isolated O-Type Star Spectroscopic Survey of the SMC, and we update our algorithm to calculate more accurate velocities compared to those obtained previously from DR2. We find a decrease in median velocity from 39 to 29 km s−1, implying that the proper motions from our previous work were systematically overestimated. We present the velocity distribution for OBe stars and quantitatively compare it to those of noncompact binaries and high-mass X-ray binaries. We confirm that OBe stars appear to be dominated by the BSS and are likely post-SN binary systems, further supporting the mass-transfer model to explain the origin of their emission-line disks. In contrast, normal OB stars may show a bimodal velocity distribution, which may be expected from different processes that occur with dynamical ejections. The kinematics of fast-rotating OB stars are similar to those of normal OB stars rather than OBe stars, suggesting that the origin of their high v r sin i is different from that of OBe stars. We update our model parameters describing the kinematic origins of the SMC field population, still confirming that for runaway stars, the DES mechanism dominates, and two-step ejections seem comparable in frequency to pure BSS ejections.