On the optical properties of Resonant Drag Instabilities: Variability of Asymptotic Giant Branch and R Coronae Borealis stars

TL;DR

This paper investigates how resonant drag instabilities (RDIs) in dust-gas mixtures around cool stars can cause observable variability in dust extinction and grain size distribution, potentially explaining phenomena in AGB and RCB stars.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed simulations of RDIs across different dust sizes and conditions, linking these instabilities to observed stellar variability.

Findings

RDIs induce 10-20% extinction variations on timescales of months to a year.

Variability is robust to source-size effects and can be spatially resolved in nearby systems.

RDIs may explain observed dust extinction variability and grain size fluctuations in cool-star outflows.

Abstract

In dusty cool-star outflow or ejection events around AGB or RCB-like stars, dust is accelerated by radiation from the star and coupled to the gas via collisional drag forces. But it has recently been shown that such dust-gas mixtures are unstable to a super-class of instabilities called the resonant drag instabilities (RDIs), which promote dust clustering. We therefore consider idealized simulations of the RDIs operating on a spectrum of dust grain sizes subject to radiative acceleration (allowing for different grain optical properties), coupled to the gas with a realistic drag law, including or excluding the effects of magnetic fields and charged grains, and calculate for the first time how the RDIs could contribute to observed variability. We show that the RDIs naturally produce significant variations ($\sim 10-20\%$ $1\sigma$-level) in the extinction, corresponding to $\sim 0.1-1\,$mag level in the stellar types above, on timescales of order months to a year. The fluctuations are surprisingly robust to finite source-size effects as they are dominated by large-scale modes, which also means their spatial structure could be resolved in some nearby systems. We also quantify how this produces variations in the line-of-sight grain size-distribution. All of these variations are similar to those observed, suggesting that the RDIs may play a key role driving observed variability in dust extinction within dusty outflow/ejection events around cool stars. We further propose that the measured variations in grain sizes could directly be used to identify the presence of the RDIs in close by systems with observations.