Related papers: Asymmetric Wolf-Rayet winds: implications for GRB …
Colliding-wind binaries (CWBs) constitute an emerging class of $\gamma$-ray sources powered by strong, dense winds in massive stellar systems. The most powerful of them are those binaries hosting a Wolf-Rayet (WR) star. Following the recent…
As massive stars evolve, their winds change. This causes a series of hydrodynamical interactions in the surrounding medium. Whenever a fast wind follows a slow wind phase, the fast wind sweeps up the slow wind in a shell, which can be…
Wolf-Rayet stars represent one of the final stages of massive stellar evolution. Relatively little is known about this short-lived phase and we currently lack reliable mass, distance, and binarity determinations for a representative sample.…
First attempts are made to derive astrophysical implications of the collision of clumped stellar winds from order of magnitude estimates and preliminary numerical simulations. Compared to colliding smooth winds, we find that the most…
The presumed Wolf-Rayet star progenitors of Type Ib/c supernovae have fast, low density winds and the shock waves generated by the supernova interaction with the wind are not expected to be radiative at typical times of observation. The…
The optical light-curves of GRB afterglows 990123 and 021211 exhibit a steep decay at 100--600 seconds after the burst, the decay becoming slower after about 10 minutes. We investigate two scenarios for the fast decaying early optical…
Early-type Wolf-Rayet(WR) stellar models harbor a super-Eddington layer in their outer envelopes due to a prominent iron opacity bump. In the past few decades, one-dimensional hydrostatic and time-steady hydrodynamic models have suggested a…
The exact nature of eta Carinae is still an open issue. In this paper we assume a binary system to explain the strong X-ray emission, but we also take into account that, near periastron and because of the highly eccentric orbit, the wind…
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…
We carry out a numerical experiment of ejecting winds in a massive colliding wind binary system, and quantifying the accretion onto the secondary star under different primary mass loss rates. We set a binary system comprising a Luminous…
Regardless of their different types of progenitors and central engines, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) were always assumed to be standalone systems after they formed. Little attention has been paid to the possibility that a stellar companion can…
The supersonic winds produced by massive stars carry a large amount of kinetic power. In numerous scenarios such winds have been proven to produce shocks in which relativistic particles are accelerated emitting non-thermal radiation. Here,…
Bow-shaped mid-infrared emission regions have been discovered in satellite observations of numerous late-type O and early-type B stars with moderate velocities relative to the ambient interstellar medium. Previously, hydrodynamical bow…
Wolf-Rayet stars are advanced evolutionary stages of massive stars. Despite their large mass-loss rates and high wind velocities, none of them display a bow shock, although a fraction of them are classified as runaway. Our 2.5-D numerical…
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…
The various stages of baryonic gamma-ray burst afterglow blast waves are reviewed. These are responsible for the afterglow emission from which much of our understanding of gamma-ray bursts derives. Initially, the blast waves are confined to…
The study of Wolf-Rayet stars plays an important role in evolutionary theories of massive stars. Among these objects, ~ 20% are known to be in binary systems and can therefore be used for the mass determination of these stars. Most of these…
WR146 is a WC6+O8 colliding-wind binary (CWB) system with thermal emission from the stellar winds of the two stars, and bright non-thermal emission from the wind-collision region (WCR) where the winds collide. We present high resolution…
The temporal and spectral evolution of gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows can be used to infer the density and density profile of the medium through which the shock is propagating. In long-duration (core-collapse) GRBs, the circumstellar…
In this paper we derive stellar parameters for the Wolf-Rayet star in the gamma Velorum binary system (WR11), from a detailed non-LTE model of its optical and infrared spectra. Compared to the study of Schaerer et al., the parameters of the…