X ray emission line profile modeling of hot stars
Abstract
The launch of high-spectral-resolution x-ray telescopes (Chandra, XMM) has provided a host of new spectral line diagnostics for the astrophysics community. In this paper we discuss Doppler-broadened emission line profiles from highly supersonic outflows of massive stars. These outflows, or winds, are driven by radiation pressure and carry a tremendous amount of kinetic energy, which can be converted to x rays by shock-heating even a small fraction of the wind plasma. The unshocked, cold wind is a source of continuum opacity to the x rays generated in the shock-heated portion of the wind. Thus the emergent line profiles are affected by transport through a two-component, moving, optically thick medium. While complicated, the interactions among these physical effects can provide quantitative information about the spatial distribution and velocity of the x-ray-emitting and absorbing plasma in stellar winds. We present quantitative models of both a spherically-symmetric wind and a wind with hot plasma confined in an equatorial disk by a dipole magnetic field.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0212313,
title = {X ray emission line profile modeling of hot stars},
author = {Roban H. Kramer and Stephanie K. Tonnesen and David H. Cohen and Stanley P. Owocki and Asif ud-Doula and Joseph J. MacFarlane},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0212313},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
4 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Review of Scientific Instruments, March 2003