Pinwheels in the Quintuplet Cluster

Details Pinwheels in the Quintuplet Cluster Pinwheels in the Quintuplet Cluster

2006-08-21

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0608427v1

Science 313 (2006) 935

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Published Science, August 19 2006. A complete version of this paper (with formatting and other minor changes) can be found at

Scientific paper

10.1126/science.1128731

The five enigmatic Cocoon stars after which the Quintuplet cluster was christened have puzzled astronomers since their discovery. Their extraordinary cool, featureless thermal spectra have been attributed to various stellar types from young to highly evolved, while their absolute luminosities places them among the supergiants. We present diffraction-limited images from the Keck 1 telescope which resolves this debate with the discovery of rotating spiral plumes characteristic of colliding-wind binary "pinwheel" nebulae. Such elegant spiral structures, found around high-luminosity Wolf-Rayet stars, have recently been implicated in the behavior of supernovae lightcurves in the radio and optical.

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