On the silicate crystallinities of oxygen-rich evolved stars and their mass-loss rates

Abstract

For decades ever since the early detection in the 1990s of the emission spectral features of crystalline silicates in oxygen-rich evolved stars, there is a long-standing debate on whether the crystallinity of the silicate dust correlates with the stellar mass loss rate. To investigate the relation between the silicate crystallinities and the mass loss rates of evolved stars, we carry out a detailed analysis of 28 nearby oxygen-rich stars. We derive the mass loss rates of these sources by modeling their spectral energy distributions from the optical to the far infrared. Unlike previous studies in which the silicate crystallinity was often measured in terms of the crystalline-to-amorphous silicate mass ratio, we characterize the silicate crystallinities of these sources with the flux ratios of the emission features of crystalline silicates to that of amorphous silicates. This does not require the knowledge of the silicate dust temperatures which are the major source of uncertainties in estimating the crystalline-to-amorphous silicate mass ratio. With a Pearson correlation coefficient of ~0.24, we find that the silicate crystallinities and the mass loss rates of these sources are not correlated. This supports the earlier findings that the dust shells of low mass-loss rate stars can contain a significant fraction of crystalline silicates without showing the characteristic features in their emission spectra.