Supersized: A Spitzer Survey of Dusty Disks around B[e] Supergiants in the Magellanic Clouds

Details Supersized: A Spitzer Survey of Dusty Disks around B[e] Supergiants in the Magellanic Clouds Supersized: A Spitzer Survey of Dusty Disks around B[e] Supergiants in the Magellanic Clouds

May 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006sptz.prop30869k&link_type=abstract

Spitzer Proposal ID #30869

Computer Science

Scientific paper

The enigmatic class of B[e] super/hypergiants include among the most luminous individual stars known. These stars are of great interest and importance to the study of massive stars and their environments. Via Cycle 1 Spitzer IRS observations, we discovered that two Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) B[e] hypergiants, R 126 and R 66, display similar, flat IR spectral enegy distributions indicative of the presence of massive, dusty circumstellar disks; R 66 displays, in addition, spectral evidence for crystalline grains and PAHs. This Spitzer/IRS discovery of ``fraternal twin'' disks around R 126 and R 66 has provided new insight into the origin and composition of dusty disks around the most massive stars. We now propose to build on these results via a comprehensive Spitzer IRS and photometric survey of thermal dust emission from a complete sample of all B[e] supergiants and hypergiants in the Magellanic Clouds. The IRS spectra and IRAC/MIPS photometry data will establish the fraction of B[e] supergiants that are encircled by dusty disks and, through modeling, will yield the range of masses, radii, and scale heights that characterize B[e] star dust disks. These results will provide crucial constraints on models of the origin of disks around massive stars , as well as on mechanisms for the production of crystalline silicate grains and for the shaping of supernova remnants.

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