Cold gas in hot star clusters: the wind from the red supergiant W26 in Westerlund 1

TL;DR

This study models the ionized wind of the red supergiant W26 in Westerlund 1, predicting emission features and analyzing observations to understand wind structure, asymmetry, and chemical composition.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed simulation of externally photoionized winds from RSGs, linking wind dynamics with observed emission lines and nebula asymmetry.

Findings

Bright nebula is asymmetric and likely confined by external ram pressure.

Line emission matches observations in flux but not in velocity, indicating asymmetry.

Nitrogen abundance in the nebula is at least 2.35 times solar.

Abstract

The massive red supergiant (RSG) W26 in Westerlund 1 is one of a growing number of RSGs shown to have winds that are ionized from the outside in. The fate of this dense wind material is important for models of second generation star formation in massive star clusters. Mackey et al. (2014) showed that external photoionization can stall the wind of RSGs and accumulate mass in a dense static shell. We use 1D R-HD simulations of an externally photoionized wind to predict the Halpha and [NII] emission arising from photoionized winds both with and without a dense shell. We analyse spectra of the Halpha and [NII] emission in the environment around W26 and compare them with predicted synthetic emission. Simulations of slow winds that are decelerated into a dense shell show strongly limb-brightened line emission, with line radial velocities that are independent of the wind speed. Faster winds (>22 km/s) do not form a dense shell, have less limb-brightening, and the line radial velocity is a good tracer of the wind speed. The brightness of the [NII] and Halpha lines as a function of distance from W26 agrees reasonably well with observations when only the line flux is considered. The radial velocity disagrees, however: the brightest observed emission is blueshifted by ~25 km/s relative to the radial velocity of the star, whereas a spherically symmetric wind has the brightest emission at zero radial velocity. Our results show that the bright nebula surrounding W26 must be asymmetric; we suggest it is confined by external ram pressure from the wind of the nearby supergiant W9. We obtain a lower limit on the nitrogen abundance within the nebula of 2.35 times solar. The line ratio strongly favours photoionization over shock ionization, and so even if the observed nebula is pressure confined there should still be an ionization front and a photoionization-confined shell closer to the star.