2006/08/17 by Peter Tuthill, John Monnier, John D. Monnier +8 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Cluster (spacecraft) #Galaxy #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Luminosity #Physics #Red supergiant #Spiral galaxy #Star cluster #Stars #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #Supergiant #Supernova #Wolf–Rayet star #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1126/science.1128731
published as Science 313 (2006) 935 · Published Science, August 19 2006. A complete version of this paper (with formatting and other minor changes) can be found at http://www.sciencemag.org/
openalex publication_date 2006/08/17 · arxiv created 2006/08/21 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The five enigmatic cocoon stars, after which the Quintuplet cluster was christened, have puzzled astronomers since their discovery. Their extraordinary cool, featureless thermal spectra have been attributed to various stellar types from young to highly evolved, whereas their absolute luminosities place them among the supergiants. We present diffraction-limited images from the Keck 1 telescope that resolve this debate with the identification of rotating spiral plumes characteristic of colliding-wind binary "pinwheel" nebulae. Such elegant spiral structures, found around high-luminosity Wolf-Rayet stars, have recently been implicated in the behavior of supernovae light curves in the radio and optical.