Related papers: Dynamics of extended AGB star envelopes
During their late pulsating phase, AGB stars expel most of their mass in the form of massive dusty envelopes, an event that largely controls the composition of interstellar matter. The envelopes, however, are distant and opaque to visible…
The high luminosity of Very Massive Stars (VMS) means that radiative forces play an important, dynamical role both in the structure and stability of their stellar envelope, and in driving strong stellar-wind mass loss. Focusing on the…
Young binaries within dense molecular clouds are subject to dynamical friction from ambient gas. Consequently, their orbits decay, with both the separation and period decreasing in time. A simple analytic expression is derived for this…
The intricate interplay of atmospheric shock waves and a complex, variable radiation field with non-equilibrium dust formation presents a considerable challenge to self-consistent modelling of atmospheres and winds of AGB stars.…
Interstellar dust forms during stellar mass-loss events, occurring either during a star's giant phase or during supernova explosions. This PhD thesis provides an in-depth investigation into the theory of dust condensation and growth,…
Massive stars form in clusters within self-gravitating molecular clouds. The size scale of these clusters is sufficiently large that non-thermal, or turbulent, motions of the gas must be taken into account when considering their formation.…
The goal is to build up a simple dynamical model for the out-flowing circumstellar envelope around AGB stars in a wide binary system to explore the parameter dependence of the geometrical characteristics of column density patterns. An AGB…
We have investigated the dynamical interaction of low- and-intermediate mass stars (from 1 to 5 Msun) with their interstellar medium (ISM). In this first paper, we examine the structures generated by the stellar winds during the Asymptotic…
Partial dust obscuration in active galactic nuclei (AGN) has been proposed as a potential explanation for some cases of AGN variability. The dust-gas mixture present in AGN tori is accelerated by radiation pressure, leading to the launching…
The evolution of star clusters is determined by several internal and external processes. Here we focus on two dominant internal effects, namely energy exchange between stars through close encounters (two-body relaxation) and mass-loss of…
This paper reports on computational evidence for the formation of cloud-like dust structures around C-rich AGB stars. This spatio-temporal structure formation process is caused by a radiative/thermal instability of dust forming gases as…
Originating in different depths of the very extended atmospheres of AGB stars, various molecular spectral lines observable in the near-infrared show diverse behaviours and can be used to probe atmospheric dynamics throughout the outer…
The path to understanding star formation processes begins with the study of the formation of molecular clouds. The outskirts of these clouds are characterized by low column densities that allow the penetration of ultraviolet radiation,…
The interplay between the ISM and the massive stars formed in clusters and, more generally, in recent events of star formation is reviewed via the global effects each has on the other. The pre-existing environment affects the properties of…
We report the results of an exploratory program to image the extended circumstellar envelopes of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars in dust-scattered galactic light. The goal is to characterize the morphology of the envelopes as a probe of…
It is generally acknowledged that the mass loss of Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars undergoes variations on different time scales. We constructed models for the dust envelopes for a sample of AGB stars to assess whether mass-loss…
Observations of increasingly higher spatial resolution reveal the existence of asymmetries in the circumstellar envelopes of a small fraction of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. Although there is no general consensus for their origin, a…
Numerical models of the extended atmospheres of long period variable or Mira stars have shown that their winds have a very simple, power law structure when averaged over the pulsation cycle. This structure is stable and robust despite the…
In this work we present the results of a systematic search for diffuse bands (DBs, hereafter) in the circumstellar envelopes of a carefully selected sample of post-AGB stars. We concentrated on the analysis of 9 of the DBs most commonly…
Most dusty winds are described by a set of similarity functions of a single independent variable that can be chosen as the overall optical depth at visual. The self-similarity implies general scaling relations among the system parameters,…