In Search of the Lost Remnant of M31 RV: Shedding Light on the New Class of Luminous Red Transients

Details In Search of the Lost Remnant of M31 RV: Shedding Light on the New Class of Luminous Red Transients In Search of the Lost Remnant of M31 RV: Shedding Light on the New Class of Luminous Red Transients

Jul 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008hst..prop11716b&link_type=abstract

HST Proposal ID #11716. Cycle 17

Physics

Scientific paper

M31 RV is a luminous red variable star that appeared in the bulge of M31 in 1988. During its outburst, which lasted a few months, it was one of the brightest stars in the Local Group. Unlike a classical nova, it was extremely cool during the eruption, and it never became optically thin or exposed a hot, blue source. There has been renewed interest in M31 RV recently, because of its remarkable similarities to V838 Mon, a luminous Galactic variable star that underwent a similar rapid expansion to become a red supergiant, and which is currently illuminating a spectacular light echo, extensively observed by HST. The outburst mechanism for this new class of luminous transients remains unknown, and is one of the major current challenges to our understanding of stellar physics. Bond and Siegel have examined WFPC2 frames of the site of M31 RV, obtained fortuitously in 1999 as parallel observations during spectroscopic studies of the nucleus of M31. The explosion site shows only a pure old population of red giants, with no obvious remnant of M31 RV. I propose now to obtain second-epoch images of the site, in the same filters, to determine whether there is an object in the field that has faded or varied, and if so what its brightness and color is. This information may provide new constraints on proposed outburst mechanisms, such as stellar mergers or collisions, and could lead to a spectroscopic observation in a future HST cycle.;

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