An exploration of dust grain growth within WCd systems using an advected scalar dust model

Abstract

Dust production is one of the more curious phenomena observed in massive binary systems with interacting winds. The high temperatures, UV photon flux and violent shocks should destroy any dust grains that condense. However, in some extreme cases dust production yields of approximately 30% of the total mass loss rate of the stellar winds have been observed. In order to better understand this phenomenon a parameter space exploration was performed using a series of numerical models of dust producing carbon phase Wolf-Rayet (WCd) systems. These models incorporated a passive scalar dust model simulating dust growth, destruction and radiative cooling. We find that reasonable dust yields were produced by these simulations. Significant changes in the dust yield were caused by changing the mass loss rates of the stars, with a greater mass loss rate contributing to increased dust yields. Similarly, a close orbit between the stars also resulted in higher dust yields. Finally, a high velocity wind shear, which induces Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instabilities and wind mixing, drastically increases the dust yields.

13 pages, 18 figures, 10 tables

References in corpus (5)

• The Athena++ Adaptive Mesh Refinement Framework: Design and Magnetohydrodynamic Solvers
• Spatial distribution of Galactic Wolf-Rayet stars and implications for the global population
• Revisiting the Impact of Dust Production from Carbon-Rich Wolf-Rayet Binaries
• The orbit and stellar masses of the archetype colliding-wind binary WR 140
• Variable dust emission by WC type Wolf-Rayet stars observed in the NEOWISE-R survey

Cited by in corpus (4)

• From Dust to Nanodust: Resolving Circumstellar Dust from the Colliding-Wind Binary Wolf-Rayet (WR) 140
• Smoke on the wind: dust nucleation in archetype colliding wind pinwheel WR104
• Inverse Compton cooling of thermal plasma in colliding-wind binaries
• A multi-ion non-equilibrium solver for ionised astrophysical plasmas with arbitrary elemental abundances