Hot and cold running water: understanding evolved star winds

Abstract

Outstanding problems concerning mass-loss from evolved stars include initial wind acceleration and what determines the clumping scale. Reconstructing physical conditions from maser data has been highly uncertain due to the exponential amplification. ALMA and e-MERLIN now provide image cubes for five H2O maser transitions around VY CMa, at spatial resolutions comparable to the size of individual clouds or better, covering excitation states from 204 to 2360 K. We use the model of Gray et al. 2016, to constrain v…