Pinwheels in the Quintuplet Cluster
Peter Tuthill,1*
John Monnier,2
Angelle Tanner,3
Donald Figer,4
Andrea Ghez,5
William Danchi6
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.
2 Astronomy Department, University of Michigan, 500 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109–1090, USA.
3 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)–California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Mail Code 100-22, 770 South Wilson Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
4 COS/Center for Imaging Science, 54 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Rochester, NY 14623–5604, USA.
5 Astronomy, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095–1547, USA.
6 NASA Goddard, Code 667, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: p.tuthill{at}physics.usyd.edu.au
