Paper detail

B[e] supergiants: What is their evolutionary status?

In this paper, we investigate the evolutionary status of B[e]~stars from the point of view of stellar evolution theory. We try to answer to the question of how massive hot supergiants --- i.e. evolved stars --- can be capable of producing a circumstellar disk. We find and discuss three possibilities: very massive evolved main sequence stars close to critical rotation due to their proximity to their Eddington-limit, blue supergiants which have just left the red supergiant branch, and single star merger remnants of a close binary system. While the latter process seems to be required to understand the properties of the spectroscopic binary R4 in the LMC, the other two scenarios may be capable of explaining the distribution of the B[e] stars in the HR~diagram. The three scenarios make different predictions about the duration of the B[e]~phase, the time integrated disk mass and the stellar properties during the B[e]~phase, which may ultimately allow to distinguish them observationally.