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Jayadev Rajagopal |
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"Dust Formation around
Massive Evolved Stars: A High Angular Resolution Interferometric
Study" |
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Copious dust formation is known to occur in the vicinity of evolved massive stars such as some types of Wolf-Rayets (WRs) and Luminous Blue Variables (LBVs).
The formation and survival of dust in the hostile environment around these very hot stars pose challenging questions. In this talk, I will describe
near- and mid-IR interferometric measurements on a small sample of
WRs and LBV-type stars which resolve dust at milli-arcsecond scales.
From these, we build models for the WR dust shells which reveal dust
as close as a few tens of AU to the central star. I discuss
these results in the context of dust formation in the colliding-wind
interface of a binary system. For the LBVs, our results indicate very recent
dust formation, with implications for the poorly-known evolutionary stage
of these systems. |