NRAO/Socorro Colloquium Series: 05 April 2002

Bruce Balick

Department of Astronomy
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington


The Onset of Adult Stellar Bipolar Disorder


The standard paradigm of bipolar outflows in evolved stars is that radiatively driven winds from the star interact with a dense, quiescent torus which inertially collimates the outflows into a pair of lobes. Time-lapse HST images, ground-based spectroscopy, molecular images in CO and HCO+, and other observations have overthrown the paradigm and presented a fascinating, albeit confusing, picture of serene and cyclic isotropic outflows followed by a brief, traumatic bipolar formation process, perhaps occurring repeatedly, followed by ballistic expansion. I'll review the concepts being considered to diagnose this manic behavior, but progress is retarded by delusions and inadequate idealizations of the analysts. (At least the pictures are pretty! -- for a good time see ftp://ftp.astro.washington.edu/pub/users/balick/symbiotics/m29_97_01_movie.gif)






Friday, 05 April 2002
12:00pm

Array Operations Center Auditorium

Local Host: Vivek Dhawan


Other NRAO/Socorro colloquia


cchandle@nrao.edu