Late Stages of Stellar Evolution - Herschel's contributions

TL;DR

This paper reviews Herschel Space Observatory's contributions to understanding the late stages of stellar evolution, focusing on infrared observations of stellar winds and circumstellar envelopes in evolved stars.

Contribution

It provides an overview of key findings from Herschel's first two years, highlighting how its instruments have advanced knowledge of stellar wind mechanisms and envelope structures.

Findings

Herschel's instruments revealed detailed envelope structures.

Insights into wind acceleration mechanisms.

Chemical enrichment processes in the interstellar medium.

Abstract

Cool objects glow in the infrared. The gas and solid-state species that escape the stellar gravitational attraction of evolved late-type stars in the form of a stellar wind are cool, with temperatures typically $\la$1500\,K, and can be ideally studied in the infrared. These stellar winds create huge extended circumstellar envelopes with extents approaching $10^{19}$\,cm. In these envelopes, a complex kinematical, thermodynamical and chemical interplay determines the global and local structural parameters. Unraveling the wind acceleration mechanisms and deriving the complicated structure of the envelopes is important to understand the late stages of evolution of ~97% of stars in galaxies as our own Milky Way. That way, we can also assess the significant chemical enrichment of the interstellar medium by the mass loss of these evolved stars. The Herschel Space Observatory is uniquely placed to study evolved stars thanks to the excellent capabilities of the three infrared and sub-millimeter instruments on board: PACS, SPIRE and HIFI. In this review, I give an overview of a few important results obtained during the first two years of Herschel observations in the field of evolved low and intermediate mass stars, and I will show how the Herschel observations can solve some historical questions on these late stages of stellar evolution, but also add some new ones.