Dust-driven Winds and Mass Loss of C-rich AGB Stars with subsolar Metallicities

TL;DR

This study models dust-driven stellar winds and mass loss in C-rich AGB stars with subsolar metallicities, improving radiative transfer treatment and applying results to stellar evolution, aligning with observations.

Contribution

It introduces enhanced hydrodynamical wind models for subsolar metallicity stars, including dust formation and improved radiative transfer, to better predict mass-loss rates.

Findings

Mass-loss rates are similar across metallicities, matching observations.

Outflow velocities differ significantly with metallicity.

SMC models require higher luminosities for dust-driven winds.

Abstract

We investigate the mass loss of highly evolved, low- and intermediate mass stars and stellar samples with subsolar metallicity. We give a qualitative as well as quantitative description which can be applied to LMC/SMC-type stellar populations. For that purpose we apply the same approach as we did for solar metallicity stars and calculate hydrodynamical wind models including dust formation with LMC and SMC abundances under consideration of an adapted model assumption. In particular, we improved the treatment of the radiative transfer problem in order to accommodate larger non-local contributions occurring with smaller opacities. For each wind model we determine an averaged mass-loss rate. The resulting, approximate mass-loss formulae are then applied to well-tested and calibrated stellar evolution calculations in order to quantify the stellar mass loss. The dynamical models for LMC and SMC metallicity result in mass-loss rates of the same order of magnitude as the solar metallicity models which is in this basic approach in agreement with observations. The hydrodynamical properties like e.g. the outflow velocity differ (for fixed C/O abundance ratio) noticeably, though. While critical luminosities of LMC and solar metallicity models fairly coincide, the SMC models need higher luminosities to develop dust-driven winds.