Poster Abstracts

Name/Affiliation:  Víctor Pereira Blanco (Complutense University of Madrid)

Title:  A study of non-thermal emission from RSG passing through the ISM during different life stages

Abstract:
Runaway O- and early B-type stars moving supersonically (> 30 km/s) through the ISM may produce bow shocks by the interaction of their strong winds and the dust. Theoretical models predict the production of high-energy photons by non-thermal radiative processes originated in the bow shock region, which can serve as particle acceleration sites. Massive stars undergo fast transitions from blue supergiant BSG) to cool red supergiant (RSG) at late evolutionary stages, and vice versa. During the RSG phase, the moment of the wind decay. However, high velocity stars (v > 100 km/s) may transfer enough energy to the ISM to trigger non-thermal photons. The transition from the fast BSG to the slow RSG winds and the evolution of the bow shock during the evolutionary track of Betelgeuse have been recently modeled by Mackey et al. (2012). We apply our non-thermal model to the different RSG stages considered in that work to check for the suitable conditions that can lead to high-energy emission in each stage.