Radio observations of massive stars

Details Radio observations of massive stars Radio observations of massive stars

2011-02-02

arxiv.org/abs/1102.0386v1

Societe Royale des Sciences de Liege, Bulletin, 2011, vol. 80, p. 67-80 (http://popups.ulg.ac.be/SRSL/sommaire.php?id=2361)

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

12 pages, 4 figures, invited review

Scientific paper

Detectable radio emission occurs during almost all phases of massive star evolution. I will concentrate on the thermal and non-thermal continuum emission from early-type stars. The thermal radio emission is due to free-free interactions in the ionized stellar wind material. Early ideas that this would lead to an easy and straightforward way of measuring the mass-loss rates were thwarted by the presence of clumping in the stellar wind. Multi-wavelength observations provide important constraints on this clumping, but do not allow its full determination. Non-thermal radio emission is associated with binarity. This conclusion was already known for some time for Wolf-Rayet stars and in recent years it has become clear that it is also true for O-type stars. In a massive-star binary, the two stellar winds collide and around the shocks a fraction of the electrons are accelerated to relativistic speeds. Spiralling in the magnetic field these electrons emit synchrotron radiation, which we detect as non-thermal radio emission. The many parameters that influence the resulting non-thermal radio fluxes make the modelling of these systems particularly challenging, but their study will provide interesting new insight into massive stars.

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