Related papers: Catalogue of particle-accelerating colliding-wind …
Context. In binary star systems, the winds from the two components impact each other, leading to strong shocks and regions of enhanced density and temperature. Potentially habitable circumbinary planets must continually be exposed to these…
The preponderance of binary systems in all known stellar populations makes them exciting dynamical agents for research on topics as varied as star formation, star-cluster dynamics and the interiors of young and old stars. Today we know that…
Several gamma-ray binaries show extended X-ray emission that may be associated to interactions of an outflow with the medium. Some of these systems are, or may be, high-mass binaries harboring young nonaccreting pulsars, in which the…
Polarization provides additional diagnostic opportunities for probing the structured environments of massive stars as well as the illumination of those environments by stars that are not spherical. After a brief overview of polarization…
Binary systems containing a massive star and a non-accreting pulsar present strong interaction between the stellar and the pulsar winds. The properties of this interaction, which largely determine the non-thermal radiation in these systems,…
Massive stars are among the most important objects in the Universe and many (most?) of them are formed in binaries. A selection of observational and theoretical facts that illustrate the importance of binaries and the evolution of massive…
In the present paper we discuss a selection of facts and questions related to observations and evolutionary calculations of massive single stars and massive stars in interacting binaries. We focus on the surface chemical abundances, the…
Compression of the stellar winds from rapidly rotating hot stars is described by the wind compression model. However, it was also shown that rapid rotation leads to rotational distortion of the stellar surface, resulting in the appearance…
The $\eta$ Carinae binary system is the first $\gamma$-ray binary ever observed which does not contain a compact object. The dense wind of the primary star shocks against the fast light wind coming from the companion star, creating the…
Interacting binaries are of general interest as laboratories for investigating the physics of accretion, which gives rise to the bulk of high-energy radiation in the Galaxy. They allow us to probe stellar evolution processes that cannot be…
Previous generations of X-ray observatories revealed a group of massive binaries that were relatively bright X-ray emitters. This was attributed to emission of shock-heated plasma in the wind-wind interaction zone located between the stars.…
The Crab Nebula demonstrates that neutron stars can interact with their environments in spectacular fashion, their relativistic winds generating nebulae observable across the electromagnetic spectrum. At many previous conferences,…
Many stars across all classes possess strong enough magnetic fields to influence dynamical flow of material off the stellar surface. For the case of massive stars (O and B types), about 10\% of them harbour strong, globally ordered (mostly…
Colliding winds of massive binaries have long been considered as potential sites of non-thermal high-energy photon production. This is motivated by the detection of non-thermal spectra in the radio band, as well as by correlation studies of…
The properties, impact, and fate of hot stars cannot be understood without considering their winds. Revealed to be an almost ubiquitous phenomenon in the regime of massive stars, the winds of hot stars arise from a complex physical…
The Crab Nebula is one of the most efficient accelerators in the Galaxy and the only galactic source showing direct evidence of PeV particles. In spite of this, the physical process behind such effective acceleration is still a deep…
In this paper we survey the theory of wind accretion in high mass X-ray binaries hosting a magnetic neutron star and a supergiant companion. We concentrate on the different types of interaction between the inflowing wind matter and the…
Supernova remnants (SNRs) are often considered as the main sites of acceleration of cosmic rays in our Galaxy, possibly up to the knee. However, their ability to accelerate particles to reach PeV energies is questionable and lacks…
(abridged) The interaction of a fast wind with a spherical Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) wind is thought to be the basic mechanism for shaping Pre-Planetary Nebulae (PPN) and later Planetary Nebulae (PN). Due to the large speed of the fast…
The paper is devoted to the consideration of the role of the donor stellar wind in the matter exchange between the components of detached binary systems. A classification of close binary systems with interacting components is proposed. A…