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[113.01] X-ray Line Profiles of Magnetically Confined Hot-Star Winds

S. K. Tonnesen, D. H. Cohen (Swarthmore College), S. P. Owocki (Bartol Research Institute), A. ud-Doula (North Carolina State University), M. Gagne, M. Oksala (West Chester University)

With the discovery of a strong magnetic field on \theta¹ Orionis C, the magnetically confined wind shock model has become a leading explanation for X-ray emission from some O and B stars. This model involves a dipole field that channels the stellar wind from both poles of the star towards the equator where the resulting shocks heat the wind to X-ray emitting temperatures. As the shocked wind cools, it feeds an equatorial disk that can be opaque to X-rays. In this poster we describe synthetic line profiles from both analytic models and magnetohydrodynamic numerical simulations of magnetically confined hot star winds. We discuss the effect of the closed vs. open field regions on line shape and width, and also discuss effects of absorption arising from the equatorial cooling disk and the cool polar wind. For a star with a tilted dipole, our viewing angle to the magnetically confined wind structure changes as the star rotates, making the line profiles phase-dependent. We compare our synthesized line profiles and band-pass fluxes to phase-resolved Chandra spectra of \theta¹ Orionis C.

This work is supported by the NASA, under grant NAS8-39073.

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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34, #4
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.