In the old days (pre ∼1990) hot stellar winds were assumed to be smooth, which made life fairly easy and bothered no one. Then after suspicious behaviour had been revealed, e.g. stochastic temporal variability in broadband polarimetry of single hot stars, it took the emerging CCD technology developed in the preceding decades (∼1970-80’s) to reveal that these winds were far from smooth. It was mainly high-S/N, time-dependent spectroscopy of strong optical recombination emission lines in WR, and also a few OB and other stars with strong hot winds, that indicated all hot stellar winds likely to be pervaded by thousands of multiscale (compressible supersonic turbulent?) structures, whose driver is probably some kind of radiative instability. Quantitative estimates of clumping-independent mass-loss rates came from various fronts, mainly dependent directly on density (e.g. electron-scattering wings of emission lines, UV spectroscopy of weak resonance lines, and binary-star properties including orbital-period changes, electron-scattering, and X-ray fluxes from colliding winds) rather than the more common, easier-to-obtain but clumping-dependent density-squared diagnostics (e.g. free-free emission in the IR/radio and recombination lines, of which the favourite has always been Hα). Many big questions still remain, such as: What do the clumps really look like? Do clumping properties change as one recedes from the mother star? Is clumping universal? Does the relative clumping correction depend on $dot{M}$ itself?
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:Potsdam/oai:kobv.de-opus-ubp:1763 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Moffat, Anthony F. J. |
| Publisher | Universität Potsdam, Extern. Extern |
| Source Sets | Potsdam University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | InProceedings |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/doku/urheberrecht.php |
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