UBVRI linear polarisation in Wolf-Rayet winds Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Fullard A.G.
  2. St-Louis N.
  3. Moffat A.F.J.
  4. Piirola V.E.
  5. Manset N.,Hoffman J.L.
  6. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars have strong, hot winds, with mass-loss rates at least a factor of 10 greater than their O-star progenitors, although their terminal wind speeds are similar. In this paper, we use the technique of multiband linear polarimetry to extract information on the global asymmetry of the wind in a sample of 47 bright Galactic WR stars. Our observations also include time-dependent observations of 17 stars in the sample. The path to our goal includes removing the dominating component of wavelength-dependent InterStellar Polarization (ISP), which normally follows the well-known Serkowski law. We include a wavelength-dependent ISP position angle parameter in our ISP law and find that 15 stars show significant results for this parameter. We detect a significant component of wavelength-independent polarization due to electron scattering in the wind for 10 cases, with most WR stars showing none at the ~0.05% level precision of our data. The intrinsically polarized stars can be explained with binary interaction, large-scale wind structure, and clumping. We also found that 5 stars out of 19 observed with the Stromgren b filter (probing the complex {lambda}4600-4700{AA} emission-line region) have significant residuals from the ISP law and propose that this is due to wind asymmetries. We provide a useful catalog of ISP for 47 bright Galactic WR stars and upper limits on the possible level of intrinsic polarization.

Keywords
  1. wolf-rayet-stars
  2. multiple-stars
  3. surveys
  4. polarimetry
  5. visible-astronomy
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2020AJ....159..214F
See also HTML
https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/AJ/159/214
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/159/214
Document Object Identifer DOI
doi:10.26093/cds/vizier.51590214

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History

2020-07-21T09:19:33Z
Resource record created
2020-07-21T09:19:33Z
Created
2021-12-07T21:19:33Z
Updated

Contact

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CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
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