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Paper: On the Relevance of Tidal Interactions in HD 5980
Volume: 367, Massive Stars in Interactive Binaries
Page: 437
Authors: Toledano, O.; Koenigsberger, G.; Moreno, E.
Abstract: HD 5980 is a very massive and luminous system in the Small Magellanic Cloud in which the primary star appears to be undergoing a transition between the O-star and the Wolf-Rayet evolutionary phases. It is thus believed to be currently in the luminous blue variable (LBV) evolutionary phase. In this paper we use a one-layer stellar pulsation model to calculate the amplitudes of the oscillations due to tidal interactions for different assumed diameters of the LBV star. We find that the tangential velocity amplitudes of the outer layer increase from Vφ <1 km s−1 for R1 =21 R to values close to the sound speed for R1 =48 R, the latter believed to be the radius near the time of the 1994 LBV-like eruption. We suggest that the thermal dissipation of mechanical energy from the oscillations, through the action of shear forces, could be a significant contributing factor to the instability that produced the LBV-like mass-shedding event.
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