A WISE Look at Evolved Massive Stars and Their Environments

Details A WISE Look at Evolved Massive Stars and Their Environments A WISE Look at Evolved Massive Stars and Their Environments

Jan 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21733310w&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #333.10; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Massive stars play a key role in the chemical and mechanical evolution of the ISM in galaxies. These luminous stars with their strong winds and mass outflows are the dominating influence on their environment in terms of energetics and chemical modification of the ISM. Despite their importance, our knowledge about their formation and evolution is surprisingly limited. In particular, the post main sequence evolution of massive stars, where they shed most of their mass, is poorly understand. Observationally, this stage can be explored through the study of Wolf-Rayet stars (WRs), luminous blue variables (LBVs) and red supergiants (RSGs).
Recently, a large population of obscured evolved massive stars has been revealed by observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope through their prominent circumstellar shells at 24 micron, highlighting that the mid-IR is especially suited to the study of these objects. WISE will for the first time enable an unbiased, comprehensive, and homogeneous look at the known population of evolved massive stars at these wavelengths. We will present WISE photometry and images for evolved massive stars and their environments. As part of this effort, we have already discovered a previously unknown shell around WR 8 at 22 micron. We will provide an overview of the mid-IR morphology of such nebulae for all known WRs and LBVs and a comparison to their optical properties. We will also explore the photometric characteristics of evolved massive stars in the WISE bands. 2MASS and Spitzer data have been used to identify the missing population of highly obscured WRs in the Galaxy. We will define equivalent color criteria for the WISE bands to support similar search efforts with the WISE archive.

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