- Details
- Published on 16 September 2011
Vol. 534
In section 6. Interstellar and circumstellar matter
Discovery of multiple dust shells beyond 1 arcmin in the circumstellar envelope of IRC+10216 using Herschel/PACS

The gas and dust associated with outflows from AGB stars are a "fossil record" of the mass-loss history. In particular, scattered light from dust shells surrounding the C-rich AGB star IRC10216 has been used to trace mass loss over the past few thousand years. Now in this paper, Decin et al. use Herschel PACS images to trace thermal emission from dust arcs out to 320 arc seconds from the star, thus tracing mass loss over the past 16000 years. The mass loss appears to occur mostly in pulses separated by a few hundred years.