The very short and compact meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society “Bridging the gap: from massive stars to supernovae” was held in Kavli Royal Society Centre of Chicheley Hall, in the English countryside of Buckinghamshire (June 1-2). Even though it lasted two days only, a number of excellent talks was delivered discussing the connection or the gap (depending on the perspective) between the massive stars and supernovae, proving that we know some things but a lot has to be done.
I had the opportunity to present a poster (pdf file) entitled: “B[e] Supergiants’ circumstellar environment: disks or rings?” with the following abstract:
Extreme mass-loss activity characterize some phases of evolution of massive stars (such as Luminous Blue Variables, Yellow Hypergiants, B[e] Supergiants), which strongly affects the stars and their circumstellar environment almost before they become Supernovae. Currently, our understanding of these phases it not well-established, such as the lack of B[e] Supergiants (B[e]SGs) predicted from stellar evolution theory. In order to improve our knowledge for the particular class of B[e]SGs we have initiated a campaign to investigate the structure of their circumstellar material, which consists of a complex combination of atomic, molecular and dust regions of different temperatures and densities. We obtained high-resolution optical and near-infrared spectra (using MPG-ESO/FEROS, GEMINI/Phoenix and VLT/CRIRES, respectively) for a number of Galactic B[e]SGs. We examine the [OI] and [CaII] emission lines and the CO bandheads to probe the structure and the kinematics of their formation regions. We find that these emission lines form in a series of single and/or multiple equatorial rings, a probable result of previous mass-loss events.
