Dynamical Stellar Dust Shells: Different Perspectives

Extract

In the last decades considerable progress has been achieved in the physical understanding and modelling of dusty stellar atmospheres and surroundings, as represented by stationary dust driven winds, pulsating shells of Miras and LPVs, episodic phenomena, like occultations of RCrB stars, the atmospheres of brown dwarfs, or even by “hot” objects like dust forming Wolf-Rayet stars.

For all these systems the notions “understanding” and “modelling” depend on the level of the physical approach defined by specific perspectives chosen by a basic “window of perception” for each class of particular objects and its appropriate description within this frame. This is defined by the fundamental assumptions with regard to the global and local appearance and the properties of the considered object, its focused characteristic length and time scales of the various determining processes taken into account, and, of course, by an appropriate body of physical equations necessary for an adequate description within the context of the adopted perspective. In this view, any real approach concentrates on special aspects (or a combination of it), like radiative transfer, wind generation, spectral appearance, dynamical behaviour, global and local stability, cluster nucleation, grain growth and processing, chemistry, interplay of physical and chemical processes, etc. Consequently, any approach projects only particular properties of the considered object, each constituting important ingredients necessary for a final consistent quantitative modelling and a comprehensive physical understanding.