ALMA reveals VYCMa's sub-mm maser and dust distribution
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en
Communication dans un congrès
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Revolution in Astronomy with ALMA: The Third Year. Proceedings of a Conference held at the Tokyo International Forum, Tokyo, Japan 8-11 December 2014. Edited by Daisuke Iono, Ken-ichi Tatematsu, Alwyn Wootten, and Leonardo Testi. ASP Conference Series Vol. 499. San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2015, p.337, 2014-12-08, Tokyo.
Resumen en inglés
Cool, evolved stars have copious, enriched winds. The structure of these winds and the way they are accelerated is not well known. We need to improve our understanding by studying the dynamics from the pulsating stellar ...Leer más >
Cool, evolved stars have copious, enriched winds. The structure of these winds and the way they are accelerated is not well known. We need to improve our understanding by studying the dynamics from the pulsating stellar surface to about 10 stellar radii, where radiation pressure on dust is fully effective. Some red supergiants have highly asymmetric nebulae, implicating additional forces. We retrieved ALMA Science Verification data providing images of sub-mm line and continuum emission from VY CMa. This enables us to locate water masers with milli-arcsec precision and resolve the dusty continuum. The 658-, 321- and 325-GHz masers lie in irregular, thick shells at increasing distances from the centre of expansion. For the first time this is confirmed as the stellar position, coinciding with a compact peak offset to the NW of the brightest continuum emission. The maser shells (and dust formation zone) overlap but avoid each other on tens-au scales. Their distribution is broadly consistent with excitation models but the conditions and kinematics appear to be complicated by wind collisions, clumping and asymmetries.< Leer menos
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Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
Astrophysics
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