Probing the Multiplicity of Dusty Wolf-Rayet Stars with Multi-Wavelength Techniques:
Faculty Mentor Name
Noel Richardson
Format Preference
Poster
Abstract
Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars, a late-stage of evolution for massive stars, have lost their outer hydrogen envelopes and have high mass-loss rates. These stars are characterized by strong carbon emission lines from their stellar winds and solid infrared excesses from the dust surrounding them. Dust should form in cold, dense conditions, but the opposite occurs for WRs. Though we are yet to find how dust is formed in such an extremely hostile environment, we take high-resolution mid-infrared imaging of a sample of the most prodigious WR stars. This allows one to map rapidly changing dust-forming regions and derive some basic properties of the freshly formed dust and the system it inhabits. To resolve these produced dust shells, archival data will be collected from previous JWST/MIRI binary WR observations. Prototypes will consist of using this data to construct geometric models of the dust plumes these shocks produce and inferring the orbital geometry for these systems. We shall then follow this analysis with the JWST/MIRI imaging of additional WR systems to test our constructed program and reveal the fine structure of the dust shells and extend the known survivability to greater than 200,000 AU. Once these steps are completed, we will have a greater understanding of the dust survival, temperature, and propagation for these systems, as well as constraints for the orbits.
Probing the Multiplicity of Dusty Wolf-Rayet Stars with Multi-Wavelength Techniques:
Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars, a late-stage of evolution for massive stars, have lost their outer hydrogen envelopes and have high mass-loss rates. These stars are characterized by strong carbon emission lines from their stellar winds and solid infrared excesses from the dust surrounding them. Dust should form in cold, dense conditions, but the opposite occurs for WRs. Though we are yet to find how dust is formed in such an extremely hostile environment, we take high-resolution mid-infrared imaging of a sample of the most prodigious WR stars. This allows one to map rapidly changing dust-forming regions and derive some basic properties of the freshly formed dust and the system it inhabits. To resolve these produced dust shells, archival data will be collected from previous JWST/MIRI binary WR observations. Prototypes will consist of using this data to construct geometric models of the dust plumes these shocks produce and inferring the orbital geometry for these systems. We shall then follow this analysis with the JWST/MIRI imaging of additional WR systems to test our constructed program and reveal the fine structure of the dust shells and extend the known survivability to greater than 200,000 AU. Once these steps are completed, we will have a greater understanding of the dust survival, temperature, and propagation for these systems, as well as constraints for the orbits.