P Cygni: An Extraordinary Luminous Blue Variable

Abstract

P Cygni is a prototype for understanding mass loss from massive stars. This textbook star is known first of all because of two great eruptions in the 17th century. In the first half of this century it has given its name to a class of stars which are characterized by spectral lines consisting of nearly undisplaced emissions accompanied by a blue-displaced absorption component. This characteristic P Cygni-type profile betrays the presence of a stellar wind, but P Cygni's wind is quite unlike that of other hot supergiants. P Cygni was the first star that showed the effects of stellar evoluton from a study of its photometric history. It shares some common properties with the so-called Luminous Blue Variables. However, P Cygni is a unique object. This review deals with P Cygni's photometric properties, its circumstellar environment - including infrared and radio observations - and its optical and ultraviolet spectrum. Smaller sections deal with P Cygni's wind structure and evolution.

35 pages including 6 figures. Accepted for publication in Space Science Reviews

References in corpus (1)

• The Manchester occulting mask imager (MOMI) - first results on the environment of P Cygni

Cited by in corpus (9)

• A Survey of Local Group Galaxies Currently Forming Stars: III. A Search for Luminous Blue Variables and Other H-alpha Emission-Lined Stars
• Asphericity and clumpiness in the winds of Luminous Blue Variables
• An Indication for the Binarity of P Cygni from Its Seventeenth Century Eruption
• A fallback accretion model for the unusual type II-P supernova iPTF14hls
• SN 2021adxl: A luminous nearby interacting supernova in an extremely low metallicity environment
• The H-alpha Variations of the Luminous Blue Variable P Cygni: Discrete Absorption Components and the Short S Doradus Phase
• 13 Years of P Cygni Spectropolarimetry: Investigating Mass-loss Through H$\alpha$, Periodicity, and Ellipticity
• Properties of the PCygni wind found using the Self Absorption Curve method
• Fundamental stellar parameters for selected T-Tauri stars in the Chamaeleon and Rho Ophiuchus star-forming regions