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Title: Transients obscured by dusty discs
ABSTRACT Dust absorption is invoked in a number of contexts for hiding a star that has survived some sort of transient event from view. Dust formed in a transient is expanding away from the star and, in spherical models, the mass and energy budgets implied by a high optical depth at late times make such models untenable. Concentrating the dust in a disc or torus can in principle hide a source from an equatorial observer using less mass and so delay this problem. However, using axisymmetric dust radiation transfer models with a range of equatorial dust concentrations, we find that this is quite difficult to achieve in practice. The polar optical depth must be either low or high to avoid scattering optical photons to equatorial observers. Most of the emission remains at wavelengths easily observed by JWST. The equatorial brightness can be significantly suppressed for very discy configurations with little polar optical depth – but only by a factor of ∼2 for polar optical depths of τp = 1 and ∼5 for τp = 0.1 even for a very high optical depth disc (τe = 1000) viewed edge-on. It is particularly difficult to hide a source with silicate dusts because the absorption feature near 10 µm frequently leads to the emission being concentrated just bluewards of the feature, near 8 µm.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2307385
PAR ID:
10526450
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Publisher / Repository:
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Volume:
529
Issue:
3
ISSN:
0035-8711
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1958 to 1969
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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