S22B0061
S22B0061
Dust-forming Carbon-rich Wolf-Rayet (WC) binaries present an early and substantial source of dust that could help resolve the uncertain origin of significant quantities of dust observed in galaxies in the local and early Universe. However, key questions persist on the dust formation physics in the hostile colliding-wind environment around the WC binaries. New IR instrumentation has unlocked a new window to investigate dust formation around WC binaries. The AO correction and high contrast imaging enabled by the vortex coronagraph and the newly installed pyramid wavefront sensor (PyWFS) on Keck/NIRC2 provide the best quality IR imaging of dust associated with WC stars. Geometric models of the circumstellar dust morphology present a valuable tool for deriving key physical parameters that regulate the dust formation efficiency in colliding-wind binaries; however, such models require multi-epoch high resolution imaging to capture the dust proper motion. On Aug 2020, we successfully completed the first stage of a NIRC2-PyWFS mini-survey of four dusty WC binaries. We therefore request 1 full Keck night through the Subaru-Keck time exchange program to complete the follow-up imaging observations of the four dusty WC binaries with NIRC2-PyWFS to validate our geometric dust models.
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