Abstract
The most massive stars are thought to lose a significant fraction of their mass in a steady wind during the main-sequence and blue supergiant phases. This in turn sets the stage for their further evolution and eventual supernova, and preconditions the surrounding medium for all following events, with consequences for ISM energization, chemical enrichment, and dust formation. Understanding these processes requires accurate observational constraints on the mass-loss rates of the most luminous stars, which can also be used to test theories of stellar wind driving. In the past, mass-loss rates have been characterized via collisional emission processes such as optical H\(\alpha \) and free-free radio emission, but these so-called “density squared” diagnostics require correction in the presence of widespread clumping. Recent observational and theoretical evidence points to the likelihood of a ubiquitously high level of such clumping in hot-star winds, but quantifying its effects requires a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics of radiatively driven winds and their stochastic instabilities. Furthermore, large-scale structures initiating in surface anisotropies and propagating throughout the wind can also affect wind driving and alter mass-loss diagnostics. Time series spectroscopy of high resonance-line opacity in the UV, capable of high resolution and high signal-to-noise, are required to better understand these complex dynamics, and more accurately determine mass-loss rates. The proposed Polstar mission (Scowen et al. 2022, this volume) provides the necessary resolution at the Sobolev (∼10 km s−1) or sound-speed (∼20 km s−1) scale, for over three dozen bright galactic massive stars with signal-to noise an order of magnitude above that of the celebrated MEGA campaign (Massa et al. 1995) of the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE), via continuous observations that track propagating structures through the winds in real time. Supporting geometric constraints are provided by the polarimetric capabilities present in all the datasets of such a mission.
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Funding
RI acknowledges support from a grant by the National Science Foundation, AST-2009412. PS acknowledges support by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to formulate the mission proposal for Polstar. YN acknowledges support from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) in the framework of the PRODEX Programme (contracts linked to XMM-Newton and Gaia). SE acknowledges the STAREX grant from the ERC Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 833925), and the COST Action ChETEC (CA 16117) supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). A.D.-U. is supported by NASA under award number 80GSFC21M0002. AuD acknowledges support by NASA through Chandra Award number TM1-22001B issued by the Chandra X-ray Observatory 27 Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for and on behalf of NASA under contract NAS8-03060. NS acknowledges support provided by NAWA through grant number PPN/SZN/2020/1/00016/U/DRAFT/00001/U/00001. LH, FAD, and JOS acknowledge support from the Odysseus program of the Belgian Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) under grant G0H9218N. The authors also wish to thank the anonymous referee for several helpful suggestions, including adjustments of the target list.
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All authors contributed to the writing of the paper. SE computed the evolutionary tracks in the r-q diagram presented in Sect. 2 and shown in Fig. 1. GJP and KGG were the main contributors to Sects. 2 and 3. RI and JLH primarily contributed the calculations and text for Sect. 4. GJP wrote Sect. 5.
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This research has made use of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System and the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France. The work has also made use of the BeSS database, operated at LESIA, Observatoire de Meudon, France: http://basebe.obspm.fr. This research made use of Astropy, http://www.astropy.org a community-developed core Python package.
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Gayley, K.G., Vink, J.S., ud-Doula, A. et al. Understanding structure in line-driven stellar winds using ultraviolet spectropolarimetry in the time domain. Astrophys Space Sci 367, 123 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-022-04142-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-022-04142-6