Related papers: Anisotropic winds in Wolf-Rayet binary identify po…
Classical Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars mark an important stage in the late evolution of massive stars. As hydrogen-poor massive stars, these objects have lost their outer layers, while still losing further mass through strong winds indicated by…
Massive Wolf-Rayet stars are recognized today to be in a very common, but short, evolutionary phase of massive stars. While our understanding of Wolf-Rayet stars has increased dramatically over the past decades, it remains unclear whether…
WR 112 is a dust-forming carbon-rich Wolf-Rayet (WC) binary with a dusty circumstellar nebula that exhibits a complex asymmetric morphology, which traces the orbital motion and dust formation in the colliding winds of the central binary.…
Hydrostatic models of Wolf-Rayet stars typically contain low-density outer envelopes that inflate the stellar radii by a factor of several and are capped by a denser shell of gas. Inflated envelopes and density inversions are hallmarks of…
A mysterious X-ray-emitting object has been detected moving away from the high-mass gamma-ray binary PSR B1259-63, which contains a non-accreting pulsar and a Be star whose winds collide forming a complex interaction structure. Given the…
The association of a supernova with a gamma-ray burst (GRB 030329) implies a massive star progenitor, which is expected to have an environment formed by pre-burst stellar winds. Although some sources are consistent with the expected wind…
We present XMM-Newton observations of gamma^2 Velorum (WR 11, WC8+O7.5III, P = 78.53 d), a nearby Wolf-Ray binary system, at its X-ray high and low states. At high state, emission from a hot collisional plasma dominates from about 1 to 8…
High-mass gamma-ray binaries are powerful nonthermal galactic sources, some of them hosting a pulsar whose relativistic wind interacts with a likely inhomogeneous stellar wind. So far, modeling these sources including stellar wind…
The favoured progenitors of long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are rapidly rotating Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars. However, most Galactic WR stars are slow rotators, as stellar winds are thought to remove angular momentum. This poses a challenge…
We present radiative-transfer modelling of the dusty spiral Pinwheel Nebula observed around the Wolf-Rayet/OB-star binary WR104. The models are based on the three-dimensional radiative-transfer code TORUS, modified to include an adaptive…
Supergiant High Mass X-ray Binary systems (sgHMXBs) consist of a massive, late type, star and a neutron star. The massive stars exhibits strong, radiatively driven, stellar winds. Wind accretion onto compact object triggers X-ray emission,…
Some isolated Wolf-Rayet stars present random variability in their optical flux and polarization. We make the assumption that such variability is caused by the presence of regions of enhanced density, i.e. blobs, in their envelopes. In…
We consider models for gamma-ray bursts in which a collimated jet expands either into a homogeneous medium or into a stellar wind environment, and calculate the expected afterglow temporal behavior. We show that (i) following a break and a…
A small number of dusty Wolf-Rayet stars have been resolved into pinwheel nebulae, defined by their ``rotating'' spiral dust shells observed in the infrared. This morphology is naturally explained by dust formation associated with colliding…
Suzaku observations of the Wolf-Rayet binary WR 140 (WC7pd+O5.5fc) were made at four different times around periastron passage in 2009 January. The spectra changed in shape and flux with the phase. As periastron approached, the column…
We present results from a spectroscopic search for massive companions to dust-making Galactic WC9 stars as a step to testing the paradigm that dust formation in these systems requires colliding winds to produce over densities. We find…
Massive stars in the red supergiant (RSG) phase are known to undergo strong mass loss through winds and observations indicate that a substantial part of this mass loss could be driven by localised and episodic outflows. Various mechanisms…
Context. Colliding-wind binaries are massive stellar systems featuring strong, interacting winds. These binaries may be actual particle accelerators, making them variable gamma-ray sources due to changes in the wind collision region along…
We present the results of three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic (3D MHD) simulations of the plasma flow structure in the vicinity of a compact cluster of young massive stars. The cluster is considered at the evolutionary stage dominated by…
Apep is the brightest and most luminous non-thermal colliding-wind binary by over an order of magnitude. It has been suggested from infrared observations that one of the Wolf-Rayet stars in Apep is launching an anisotropic wind. Here we…