The polarized dust envelope around the red supergiant MU Cephei

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics

Scientific paper

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Cosmic Dust, Polarized Light, Red Giant Stars, Stellar Envelopes, Supergiant Stars, Absorption Spectra, Brightness Distribution, Light Scattering, Line Of Sight, Stellar Mass, Stellar Spectrophotometry

Scientific paper

A polarization map of scattered light around the red supergiant Mu Cephei has been developed which shows a large dust envelope with a morphology agreeing fairly well with that of its Na I emission. A structure with two different shells lying inside and outside of about 17 arcsec from the star is found along with a significant asymmetry. The polarization of the scattered light is not tangentially oriented, with deviations of about 20 deg, which can be at least qualitatively explained by homogeneously aligned nonspherical grains. The alignment of the polarization suggests that it is due to the interstellar magnetic field. The colors of the polarized scattered light around Mu Cep and Alpha Ori are found to be consistently very similar with a B and U strikingly different from that predicted from Rayleigh scattering. The polarized intensity of the shells, interpreted with Mie scattering theory, yields dust loss rates in agreement with a rate deduced from infrared data.

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