Mid-infrared photometry of the Wolf-Rayet star HD 38030 in the Large Magellanic Cloud from the NEOWISE-R mission show it to have undergone a dust-formation episode in 2018 and the dust to have cooled in 2019-20. New spectroscopy with the MagE spectrograph on the Magellan I Baade Telescope in 2019 and 2020 show absorption lines attributable to a companion of type near O9.7III-IV. We found a significant shift in the radial velocity of the C IV 5801-12 blend compared with the RVs measured in 1984 and 1993. The results combine to suggest that HD 38030 is a colliding-wind binary having short-lived dust formation episodes, like the Galactic systems WR 140 and WR 19, but at intervals in excess of 20 yr.
@article{arxiv.2106.03781,
title = {The episodic dust-making Wolf-Rayet star HD 38030 in the Large Magellanic Cloud},
author = {Peredur M. Williams and Nidia I. Morrell and Konstantina Boutsia and Philip Massey},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.03781},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
8 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in the MNRAS