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New paper on rho Cas and its recent outburst in 2013
A new outburst of the yellow hypergiant star Rho Cas
Michaela Kraus, Indrek Kolka, Anna Aret, Dieter H. Nickeler, Grigoris Maravelias, Tõnis Eenmäe, Alex Lobel, Valentina G. Klochkova
Yellow hypergiants are evolved massive stars that were suggested to be in post-red supergiant stage. Post-red supergiants that evolve back to the blue, hot side of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram can intersect a temperature domain in which their atmospheres become unstable against pulsations (the Yellow Void or Yellow Wall), and the stars can experience outbursts with short, but violent mass eruptions. The yellow hypergiant Rho Cas is famous for its historical and recent outbursts, during which the star develops a cool, optically thick wind with a very brief but high mass-loss rate, causing a sudden drop in the light curve. Here we report on a new outburst of Rho Cas which occurred in 2013, accompanied by a temperature decrease of ~3000 K and a brightness drop of 0.6 mag. During the outburst TiO bands appear, together with many low excitation metallic atmospheric lines characteristic for a later spectral type. With this new outburst, it appears that the time interval between individual events decreases, which might indicate that Rho Cas is preparing for a major eruption that could help the star to pass through the Yellow Void. We also analysed the emission features that appear during phases of maximum brightness and find that they vary synchronous with the emission in the prominent [CaII] lines. We conclude that the occasionally detected emission in the spectra of Rho Cas, as well as certain asymmetries seen in the absorption lines of low to medium-excitation potential, are circumstellar in nature, and we discuss the possible origin of this material.
New paper on the circumstellar environment of galactic B[e] supergiants
Finally, after some years of work, it has been accepted for publication in MNRAS.
Resolving the kinematics of the disks around Galactic B[e] supergiants
Grigoris Maravelias, Michaela Kraus, Lydia S. Cidale, Marcelo Borges Fernandes, Maria L. Arias, Michel Curé, Georgios Vasilopoulos
B[e] Supergiants are luminous evolved massive stars. The mass-loss during this phase creates a complex circumstellar environment with atomic, molecular, and dusty regions usually found in rings or disk-like structures. For a better comprehension of the mechanisms behind the formation of these rings, detailed knowledge about their structure and dynamics is essential. To address that, we obtained high-resolution optical and near-infrared spectra for 8 selected Galactic B[e] Supergiants, for which CO emission has been detected. Assuming Keplerian rotation for the disk, we combine the kinematics obtained from the CO bands in the near-IR with those obtained by fitting the forbidden emission [OI] λ5577, [OI] λλ6300,6363, and [CaII] λλ7291,7323 lines in the optical to probe the disk structure. We find that the emission originates from multiple ring structures around all B[e] Supergiants, with each one of them displaying a unique combination of rings regardless of whether the object is part of a binary system. The confirmed binaries display spectroscopic variations of their line intensities and profiles as well as photometric variability, whereas the ring structures around the single stars are stable.
Figure 12 from the paper: A cartoon illustration of the disk-structures as derived from our analysis. We represent the [OI] λ5577 line as *[OI]*, the [OI] λλ6300, 6363 doublet as [OI], and the [CaII] λλ7291, 7323 as [CaII]. The arrows above the rings symbolize the typical ring-widths and are given in km/s. (For more details on the data used and references see Table 3. Note that the relative structures and sizes are not in scale.
