Emisión molecular de 12CO en una estrella Be clásica

Abstract

Be stars present as their principal characteristic emission lines of hydrogen and singly ionized metals, which can be temporary or permanent. The origin of these lines is attributed to the presence of a gaseous disk-like envelope surrounding the star. Throughout the last decade, we have carried out temporal monitoring of a sample of Be stars to study the evolution of the disk through the variability of their physical properties and dynamical structure. We focused our studies on the near-infrared spectral range, which presents plenty of emission lines of hydrogen, helium and neutral or singly ionized metals. Surprisingly, in one of our observations, the Be star 12 Vul presented emission of 12CO. The presence of 12CO molecular band emission in Be stars had not been previously reported. We present here the near-infrared spectra in the K-band and the results on the modeling of the 12CO molecular emission. We discuss the implications of this detection in the study of Be stars and other groups of objects with similar characteristics.