Accretion onto low mass stars boosted by their black hole companions

There are millions of undetected black holes wandering in our galaxy. Chandra, LIGO, and more recently Gaia, have given the community insights into the lives of these elusive objects when they happen to have a companion. In the case of Gaia, the companions are stars of roughly one solar mass, which implies a fractional mass ratio between the black hole and its companion. In this talk we present a series of hydrodynamical simulations that examine cases of boost in the accretion rate of a less massive companion in a stellar-black hole binary embedded in a gaseous environment. We study the possible effects of the boost in accretion as a mechanism to change the metallicity of the stars and detail how these changes would challenge our inferences about their stellar histories.