Prediction for the He I 10830A Absorption Wing in the Coming Event of Eta Carinae

Abstract

We propose an explanation to the puzzling appearance of a wide blue absorption wing in the He I 10830A P-Cygni profile of the massive binary star Eta Carinae several months before periastron passage. Our basic assumption is that the colliding winds region is responsible for the blue wing absorption. By fitting observations, we find that the maximum outflow velocity of this absorbing material is ~2300 km/s. We also assume that the secondary star is toward the observer at periastron passage. With a toy-model we achieve two significant results. (1) We show that the semimajor axis orientation we use can account for the appearance and evolution of the wide blue wing under our basic assumption. (2) We predict that the Doppler shift (the edge of the absorption profile) will reach a maximum 0-3 weeks before periastron passage, and not necessarily exactly at periastron passage or after periastron passage.

15 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Accretion at the periastron passage of Eta Carinae
• The X-ray properties of Eta Carinae during its 2020 X-ray minimum