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Register a new userWinds of Massive Stars: High Resolution X-ray Spectra of Stars in NGC 3603
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Added by
David P. Huenemoerder
Publication date
2018
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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The cluster NGC 3603 hosts some of the most massive stars in the Galaxy. With a modest 50 ks exposure with the Chandra High Energy Grating Spectrometer, we have resolved emission lines in spectra of several of the brightest cluster members which are of WNh and O spectral types. This observation provides our first definitive high-resolution spectra of such stars in this nearby starburst region. The stars studied have broadened X-ray emission lines, some with blue-shifted centroids, and are characteristic of massive stellar winds with terminal velocities around 2000--3000 km/s. X-ray luminosities and plasma temperatures are very high for both the WNh and O stars studied. We conclude that their X-rays are likely the result of colliding winds.
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We present a new method for using measured X-ray emission line fluxes from O stars to determine the shock-heating rate due to instabilities in their radiation-driven winds. The high densities of these winds means that their embedded shocks quickly cool by local radiative emission, while cooling by expansion should be negligible. Ignoring for simplicity any non-radiative mixing or conductive cooling, the method presented here exploits the idea that the cooling post-shock plasma systematically passes through the temperature characteristic of distinct emission lines in the X-ray spectrum. In this way, the observed flux distribution among these X-ray lines can be used to construct the cumulative probability distribution of shock strengths that a typical wind parcel encounters as it advects through the wind. We apply this new method (Gayley 2014) to Chandra grating spectra from five O stars with X-ray emission indicative of embedded wind shocks in effectively single massive stars. Correcting for wind absorption of the X-ray line emission is a crucial component of our analysis, and we use wind optical depth values derived from X-ray line-profile fitting (Cohen et al. 2014) in order to make that correction. The shock-heating rate results we derive for all the stars are quite similar: the average wind mass element passes through roughly one shock that heats it to at least $10^6$ K as it advects through the wind, and the cumulative distribution of shock strengths is a strongly decreasing function of temperature, consistent with a negative power-law of index $n approx 3$, implying a marginal distribution of shock strengths that scales as $T^{-4}$, and with hints of an even steeper decline or cut-off above $10^7$ K.
High resolution X-ray spectra of very young massive stars opened a new chapter in the diagnostics and understanding of the properties of stellar wind plasmas. Observations of several very young early type stars in the Orion Trapezium demonstrated that the conventional model of shock heated plasmas in stellar winds is not sufficient to explain the observed X-ray spectra. Detailed X-ray line diagnostics revealed extreme temperatures in some of the candidates as well as evidence for high plasma densities. It is also evident from high resolution spectra of more conventional early type stars, that not all show such extreme characteristics. However, the fact that some of the stars show hot and dense components and some do not requires more understanding of the physical processes involved in stellar wind emissions. The Orion Trapezium stars distinguish themselves from all the others by their extreme youth. By comparing the diverse spectral properties of theta Ori A and theta Ori E with those of theta Ori C, we further demonstrate that X-ray spectral properties of very young massive stars are far from understood.
Magnetically confined winds of early-type stars are expected to be sources of bright and hard X-rays. To clarify the systematics of the observed X-ray properties, we have analyzed a large series of Chandra and XMM observations, corresponding to all available exposures of known massive magnetic stars (over 100 exposures covering ~60% of stars compiled in the catalog of Petit et al. 2013). We show that the X-ray luminosity is strongly correlated with the stellar wind mass-loss-rate, with a power-law form that is slightly steeper than linear for the majority of the less luminous, lower-Mdot B stars and flattens for the more luminous, higher-Mdot O stars. As the winds are radiatively driven, these scalings can be equivalently written as relations with the bolometric luminosity. The observed X-ray luminosities, and their trend with mass-loss rates, are well reproduced by new MHD models, although a few overluminous stars (mostly rapidly rotating objects) exist. No relation is found between other X-ray properties (plasma temperature, absorption) and stellar or magnetic parameters, contrary to expectations (e.g. higher temperature for stronger mass-loss rate). This suggests that the main driver for the plasma properties is different from the main determinant of the X-ray luminosity. Finally, variations of the X-ray hardnesses and luminosities, in phase with the stellar rotation period, are detected for some objects and they suggest some temperature stratification to exist in massive stars magnetospheres.
We report on the analysis of the Chandra-ACIS data of O, B and WR stars in the young association Cyg OB2. X-ray spectra of 49 O-stars, 54 B-stars and 3 WR-stars are analyzed and for the brighter sources, the epoch dependence of the X-ray fluxes is investigated. The O-stars in Cyg,OB2 follow a well-defined scaling relation between their X-ray and bolometric luminosities: log(Lx/Lbol) = -7.2 +/- 0.2. This relation is in excellent agreement with the one previously derived for the Carina OB1 association. Except for the brightest O-star binaries, there is no general X-ray overluminosity due to colliding winds in O-star binaries. Roughly half of the known B-stars in the surveyed field are detected, but they fail to display a clear relationship between Lx and Lbol. Out of the three WR stars in Cyg OB2, probably only WR144 is itself responsible for the observed level of X-ray emission, at a very low log(Lx/Lbol) = -8.8 +/- 0.2. The X-ray emission of the other two WR-stars (WR145 and 146) is most probably due to their O-type companion along with a moderate contribution from a wind-wind interaction zone.
We present two self-consistent procedures that couple the hydrodynamics with calculations of the line-force in the frame of radiation wind theory. These procedures give us the line-force parameters, the velocity field, and the mass-loss rate. The first one is based on the so-called m-CAK theory. A full set of line-force parameters for $T_text{eff}ge 32,000$ K and surface gravities higher than 3.4 dex for two different metallicities are presented, along with their corresponding wind parameters. We find that the dependence of line-force parameters on effective temperature is enhanced by the dependence on $log g$. For the case of homogeneous winds (without clumping) comparison of self-consistent mass-loss rates shows a good agreement with empirical values. We also consider self-consistent wind solutions that are used as input in FASTWIND to calculate synthetic spectra. By comparison with the observed spectra for three stars with clumped winds, we found that varying the clumping factor the synthetic spectra rapidly converge into the neighbourhood region of the solution. Therefore, this self-consistent m-CAK procedure significantly reduces the number of free parameters needed to obtain a synthetic spectrum. The second procedure (called Lambert-procedure) provides a self-consistent solution beyond m-CAK theory, and line-acceleration is calculated by the full NLTE radiative transfer code CMFGEN. Both the mass-loss rate and the clumping factor are set as free parameters, hence their values are obtained by spectral fitting after the respective self-consistent hydrodynamics is calculated. Since performing the Lambert-procedure requires significant computational power, the analysis is made only for the star z-Puppis. The promising results gives a positive balance about the future applications for the self-consistent solutions presented on this thesis.
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