Apsidal motion in the massive binary HD 152248 -- Constraining the internal structure of the stars

Apsidal motion in massive eccentric binaries offers precious information about the internal structure of the stars. This is especially true for twin binaries consisting of two nearly identical stars. We make use of the tidally induced apsidal motion in the twin binary HD152248 to infer constraints on the internal structure of the O7.5 III-II stars composing this system. We build stellar evolution models with the code Cles assuming different prescriptions for the internal mixing occurring inside the stars. We identify the models that best reproduce the observationally determined present-day properties of the components of HD152248, as well as their $k_2$, and the apsidal motion rate of the system. We analyse the impact of some poorly constrained input parameters, including overshooting, turbulent diffusion, and metallicity. We further build single and binary GENEC models that account for stellar rotation to investigate the impacts of binarity and rotation. We discuss some effects that could bias our interpretation of the apsidal motion in terms of the internal structure constant. Reproducing the observed $k_2$ value and rate of apsidal motion simultaneously with the other stellar parameters requires a significant amount of internal mixing or enhanced mass-loss. The results suggest that a single-star evolution model is sufficient to describe the physics inside this binary system. Qualitatively, the high turbulent diffusion required to reproduce the observations could be partly attributed to stellar rotation. Higher-order terms in the apsidal motion are negligible. Only a very severe misalignment of the rotation axes could significantly impact the rate of apsidal motion, but such a high misalignment is highly unlikely in such a binary system. We infer an age estimate of $5.15pm0.13$ Myr for the binary and initial masses of $32.8pm0.6$ M$_odot$ for both stars.