Probing the Multiplicity of Dusty Wolf-Rayet Starts with Multiwavelength Techniques
Faculty Mentor Name
Noel Richardson, Pragati Prahan
Format Preference
Poster
Abstract
Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars represent a late-stage of evolution for massive stars. They have lost their outer hydrogen envelopes and have high mass-loss rates. Some of these stars are carbon-rich and have large infrared fluxes, which arise from dust surrounding the star. Dust should form in cold, dense conditions, but the stars’ temperatures and their winds exceed 40,000K. There are different ideas about how dust is created in these systems, so we will be examining observations of all the Galactic dust-producing systems to determine the conditions under which dust can form - namely, does the dust production require a binary companion? It is not yet known if WRs could produce dust independently, but some dusty WR stars have appeared single in studies thus far. It is thought that binary star interactions, where the O star strips the hydrogen envelope off the WC-star progenitor, could have formed these systems in the early Universe. If so, there could be a channel to create dust and new stars in the early universe before the first generation of stars exploded in supernovae. We are currently exploring the Swift/XRT archive to select observations with high enough S/N ratio for meaningful spectral analysis. We also plan to include the available infrared spectrum of the sources and begin comparison to see if binary is a primary driver for these processes and determine possible ways of creating dust.
Probing the Multiplicity of Dusty Wolf-Rayet Starts with Multiwavelength Techniques
Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars represent a late-stage of evolution for massive stars. They have lost their outer hydrogen envelopes and have high mass-loss rates. Some of these stars are carbon-rich and have large infrared fluxes, which arise from dust surrounding the star. Dust should form in cold, dense conditions, but the stars’ temperatures and their winds exceed 40,000K. There are different ideas about how dust is created in these systems, so we will be examining observations of all the Galactic dust-producing systems to determine the conditions under which dust can form - namely, does the dust production require a binary companion? It is not yet known if WRs could produce dust independently, but some dusty WR stars have appeared single in studies thus far. It is thought that binary star interactions, where the O star strips the hydrogen envelope off the WC-star progenitor, could have formed these systems in the early Universe. If so, there could be a channel to create dust and new stars in the early universe before the first generation of stars exploded in supernovae. We are currently exploring the Swift/XRT archive to select observations with high enough S/N ratio for meaningful spectral analysis. We also plan to include the available infrared spectrum of the sources and begin comparison to see if binary is a primary driver for these processes and determine possible ways of creating dust.