Common Envelope Mass Ejection in Evolved Stars: Modeling the Dust Emission from post-RGB stars in the LMC

Common Envelope (CE) systems are the result of Roche lobe overflow in interacting binaries. The subsequent evolution of the CE, its ejection and the formation of dust in its ejecta while the primary is on the Red Giant Branch, gives rise to a recently-identified evolutionary class -- dusty post-RGB stars. Their spectral energy distributions (SEDs) suggest that their mass-ejecta are similar to dusty post-Asymptotic Giant Branch (post-AGB) stars. We have modeled the SEDs of a select sample of post-RGB and post-AGB stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), quantified the total dust mass (and gas mass assuming gas-to-dust ratio) in the disks and shells and set constraints on the dust grain compositions and sizes. We find that the shell masses in the post-RGBs are generally less than those in post-AGBs, with the caveat that a substantial amount of mass in both types of objects may lie in cold, extended shells. Our models suggest that circumstellar disks, when present, are geometrically thick, flared structures with a substantial opening angle, consistent with numerical simulations of CE evolution (CEE). Comparison of our model dust mass values with the predictions of dust production during CEE on the RGB suggest that CEE occurred near or at the top of the RGB for the post-RGB sources in our sample. A surprising result is that the ejected dust in some post-RGB sources appears to be carbon-rich, providing independent support for the hypothesis of binary interaction leading to the formation of dusty post-RGB objects.