Discovery of a new Wolf-Rayet star using SAGE-LMC


V.V. Gvaramadze (1), A.-N. Chené (2,3), A.Y. Kniazev (4,1), O. Schnurr (5)

(1) Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow State University, Russia, (2) Departamento de Astronomia, Univ. de Concepcion, Chile, (3) Univ. de Valparaiso, Departamento de Fisica y Astronomia, Chile, (4) South African Astronomical Observatory and Southern African Large Telescope Foundation, South Africa, (5) AIP, An der Sternwarte, Germany

We report the first-ever discovery of an extragalactic Wolf-Rayet (WR)
star with Spitzer. A new WR star in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) was revealed
via detection of its circumstellar shell using 24 μm images obtained in the framework of
the Spitzer Survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud (SAGE-LMC). Subsequent spectroscopic
observations with the Gemini South resolved the central star in two components,
one of which is a WN3b+abs star, while the second one is a B0V star. We consider
the lopsided brightness distribution over the circumstellar shell as an indication that the
WR star is a runaway and use this interpretation to identify a possible parent cluster of
the star.

Reference: To be published in the proceedings of the meeting 'Four decades of research on massive stars' in honor of Tony Moffat, 11-15 July 2011, Saint-Michel-des-Saints, Quebec
Status: Conference proceedings

Weblink: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.0126

Comments:

Email: achene@astro-udec.cl