Ryan White

JWST Imaging of Colliding Wind Nebulae and the GRB Progenitor Apep

Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are the powerful and beautiful end-of-life stages of the most massive stars. In their final throes, they enrich the interstellar medium with carbon and heavy elements before finally undergoing core-collapse supernova. Most massive stars evolve in pairs, and so handful of these WR stars interact with another massive stellar companion and produce quickly evolving spiral dust nebulae in what is called a colliding wind binary. I spend my time developing and fitting fast geometric models to these nebulae, which uniquely reveal the sensitive orbital and stellar physics happening beyond our view. With new JWST images being revealed of these systems, we can use our models on these unique stellar laboratories to probe the physics of massive binary evolution in a phase right before supernova, and potentially shed light on the roles of WR+O/WR systems as gamma-ray burst progenitors.